“Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, country music, film, and television that are heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence.” – Wikipedia
Characteristics of Southern Gothic literature include isolation and marginalization, violence, and crime, sense of place. Southern Gothic has a lot in common with film noir because it has a skewed view of the world in which reality is bent into a general feeling of hopelessness and the smallness of the individual. I like both these genres a lot.
River Jorden
THE MIRACLE OF MERCY LAND
“Two journalists in a small Alabama town discover a mysterious book that makes them confront the past.
“If you had the power to amend choices you made in the past, would you—even if it changed everything?
“Mercy Land has made some unexpected choices for a young woman in the 1930s. The sheltered daughter of a traveling preacher, she chooses to leave her rural community to move to nearby Bay City on the warm, gulf-waters of southern Alabama. There she finds a job at the local paper and spends seven years making herself indispensable to old Doc Philips, the publisher and editor. Then she gets a frantic call at dawn—it’s the biggest news story of her life, and she can’t print a word of it.
“Doc has come into possession of a curious book that maps the lives of everyone in Bay City—decisions they’ve made in the past, and how those choices affect the future. Mercy and Doc are consumed by the mystery locked between the pages—Doc because he hopes to right a very old wrong, and Mercy because she wants to fulfill the book’s strange purpose. But when a mystery from Mercy’s past arrives by train, she begins to understand that she will have to make choices that will deeply affect everyone she loves—forever.
“A tremendously well-written tale. River Jordan is a truly gifted author. Highly recommended.” – Davis Bunn, best-selling author”
Harry Crews
“Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his obscure and wretched hometown of Enigma, Georgia. But by the time his Cadillac pulls into Enigma, he discovers an old friend is being held at tenuous bay from a lynch mob. As Harry Crews’s first novel unfolds, the Gospel Singer is forced to give way to his torment, and in doing so he reveals to the believers who have gathered at his feet just how little he is God’s man, and how much he has contributed to the corruption of each of them.”
Cherie Priest
“Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?
“Decades after trespassing children spotted the desiccated corpse wedged in the treetop, no one knows the answer.
“Kate Thrush and her former college professor, Dr. Judith Kane, travel to Cinderwich, Tennessee in hopes that maybe it was their Ellen: Katie’s lost aunt, Judith’s long-gone lover. But they’re not the only ones to have come here looking for closure. The people of Cinderwich, a town hardly more than a skeleton itself, are staunchly resistant to the outsiders’ questions about Ellen and her killer. And the deeper the two women dig, the more rot they unearth … the closer they come to exhuming the evil that lies, hungering, at the roots of Cinderwich.”
Other Southern Gothic Authors of Note
- V. C. Andrews (1923–1986)
- Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
- Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
- Poppy Z. Brite (b. 1967)
- Larry Brown (1951–2004)
- Erskine Caldwell (1903–1987)
- Truman Capote (1924–1984, early works)
- Fred Chappell (b. 1936)
–Malcolm
Malcolm's Round Table 