Previously: Every Scottish Novel Ever.
1. The Red, Red Dirt Understands
2. There’s A Sense Of Malaise And Decay Hovering Over This Old Plantation; I Can’t Imagine What Lies In The Not-So-Distant Past That Caused It
3. The Waitress Served Biscuits In A Manner Both Polite Yet Somehow Unwelcoming
4. We Don’t Speak Of What Happened To The Girl
5. Why, This House Represents The Last Vestige Of A Grandeur This Town Could Never Hope To Regain, And We Wouldn’t Sell It For The World
6. The Preacher-Man Leered
7. Best Not To Ask Too Many Questions About The Smell Coming From The Old Widder-Woman’s House On Yon Hill
8. No One Listens To What Old Pap’s Got To Say, On Account Of This Deformity, But I Say It’s You All What Has The Deformity, In Your Souls, I Knows What I’ve Seen
9. They Always Did Think Too Highly Of Themselves
10. We Bury Our Feelings And Our Relatives Alive
11. It’s Too Hot For Justice Today
12. I Drink Because This House Is Filthy And All The Servants Have Fled
13. Someone Is Going To Have To Shoot The Dog Before It Reaches The Courthouse
14. Vines Cover The Mansion Much As The Inescapable Past Covers My Ruined Life
15. Race Isn’t An Issue In This Town Because We Never Discuss It
16. The Outsider Wore Shoes And A Smug Expression
17. Horror In The Church
[Image via]
Tags: books, every novel ever, southern gothic
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I’m not even remotely well-versed in Southern Gothic as a genre so I don’t really know what defines it but I’m currently reading Julia Elliot’s short story collection The Wilds, which is described as genre-bending stories that “[blend] Southern Gothic strangeness with dystopian absurdities, sci-fi speculations with fairy-tale transformations.” Assuming the Southern Gothic descriptor is accurate, I highly recommend the collection to anyone who’s a fan of the genre. Well, to anyone, really.
ETA: Also I know this is only, at best, tangentially related to the post but the stories are beautiful and I’m a compulsive recommender when I find writing I love.
keep recommending!! I’ve gotten some of my favorite book recommendations from this commentariat.
I need that book.
She’s the best — in person and on the page.
Thank you for the recommendation! Added it to my list.
Perfection. (Goes to lie down, that’s all, just a little lie down, I’m not going mad contemplating my son’s latent homosexuality, it’s not killing me or anything, just go on and do whatever you like as always.)
The Untrustworthy Northerner Used The Servant’s Actual Name
The Fool Carpetbagger Tried to Shake Hands with the Maid, more like
Anyone want to give me some Southern Gothic reading recs? I am badly versed in the genre. (I read… Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, does that count?)
I feel silly but I only just became aware of Southern Gothic as a genre. I’ve really liked what I’ve seen so far though, so I’ll definitely be looking at any recommendations too.
I read Midnight for the first time when I was 11. I loved it but…I definitely missed a lot that I didn’t pick up until I reread later.
In addition to Faulkner and O’Connor, try Carson McCullers (Ballad of the Sad Cafe & Member of the Wedding), Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms), Dorothy Allison (Bastard out of Carolina), and anything the fuck by Harry Crews. There are many, many other practitioners of Suthren Gawthik, but that’ll get you started.
I picked it up at a used bookstore last year, not expecting a whole lot, but I did enjoy it! There’s some questionable bits (most memorably some transphobia) so I was reading with A Heavy Grain Of Salt and also kind of happy to have bought it secondhand.
Betsy Phillips’ THE WOLFS BANE is the perfect combination of Southern Gothic and classic Weird Fiction. I love it so.
Flannery O’Connor is the arch-doyenne of the Southern Gothicist Goddamn Creepy Motherfuckers hall of fame. Start with A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
also! Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is great even if you don’t like Faulkner
Huh, I’ve actually read both A Good Man Is Hard To Find and As I Lay Dying… was meh on both, maybe I just don’t like Southern Gothic?? But thank you for the suggestions! Maybe I’ll give them each a second chance.
Huh, I’ve actually read both A Good Man Is Hard To Find and As I Lay Dying… was meh on both ahaha and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a Suggestion Fail.
Oh man I feel really bad, asking for suggestions and shooting them down like that? I did not realize those were Southern Gothic, though. And I genuinely wonder how much they were ruined for me by being assigned reading in high school. I suspect that plays a big part in my assessment, more than whether the two are “good” or “bad”
Oh darling please, don’t worry, it’s the merest trifle, simply make the rest of your life a shrine to the crushing guilt you feel and we’ll call it good
^ also a Southern Gothic novel
For what it’s worth, I loathed Faulkner until I read him in the context of a gothic lit class and realized that his prose is doing the gothic lit thing of disguising the obvious truth by talking around it just as much as his characters are, and then I kind of loved him. But I’m a sucker for trick writing, so I acknowledge the impulse is not universal.
I liked Wise Blood so, so, soooooo much more than A Good Man. The Violent Bear it Away is also great. Basically you can burn A Good Man and leave the rest of O’Connor’s works and I would be okay.
I have tried three separate times to read, for college courses, AILD.
I have never made it past “my mother is a fish” without throwing the book and saying to hell with it.
My other mother once insisted it couldn’t be that bad. A month later she tipsily confided in me that she couldn’t finish it either and her headcanon was that they all died.
A Rose for Emily & Barn Burning are the shit but no one should have let Faulkner write at novel length.
#ToastYourUnpopularOpinion
I love that chapter! #roomfor2unpopularopinionsinthistown
Indeed! Just because I find it awful doesn’t mean everyone has to.
My mother to this day vividly recounts the tale of her math major college roommate bursting into the dorm room and shouting, without preamble, “My mother is a fish! My mother is a fish! What kind of a chapter is that?!”
I put the book down, opened it again, saw I had not hallucinated that chapter, threw it across the room and went to the off campus dive to hang out with my friends in good conscience.
I have been preaching this #toastyourunpopularopinion for yeaaaaars now, because shut UP Faulkner. He is worlds better as a short story writer.
I’m about a third of the way through “Midnight” right now and I’m feeling like parts of it are trying way too hard to be atmospheric and quirky, does it get better?
Hopefully this doesn’t spoil anything: I think once “the crime” happens and it turns more into a court procedural, the writing becomes more natural and better paced. I believe that’s about a third of the way through the book, actually.
I agree with the suggestions above, especially Carson McCullers, and I’ll throw in Eudora Welty (even though she wouldn’t agree).
INDEED SHE WOULD NAWT.
Seconding especially Carson McCullers. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter may be the best book I have ever read. It’s kind of… everything. Also, an adolescent girl in a working class family is the central, complex, and compelling character. (Well there’s a few main characters but she stands out as most essential to me.) So much on class, art, gender and sexuality… in great, encompassing art that is both grounded, unflinchingly, dirt-under-the-nails in the world, and transcendent in understanding. It’s really unlike any other reading experience I’ve had.
Dorothy Allison’s short story collection, “Trash,” is one of my favorites. Her stories touch on issues of sexuality and class in a very personal way, and they run the gamut in tone from pretty light (“A Lesbian Appetite”) to fairly intense modern gothic (“River of Names”).
AAA that is one of my all-time favorites! Seconded!
Please read Joshilyn Jackson. If you only read one of hers, pick BETWEEN, GEORGIA. If you go for a second, try A GROWN UP KIND OF PRETTY. If you are so in love with her writing that you must read them all, number three is your choice. Just give her a try.
That Man You Said You Spoke To? Why, He’s Been Dead for Ten Years
That’s Gothic *everywhere*, though.
Nigh on Ten Years, surely?
A good half of these are also unreleased Tom Waits songs.
When I got to #7 I immediately thought “What is she building in there?”
I did my eleventh grade term paper on the themes in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and this is triggering a wave of memories like you would not believe.
The Bad Man Takes Advantage of People But He Feels Conflicted About It
I Am A Lady And You Will Literally Pry My Hat From My Cold Dead Hands
I Am The Main Character But I Have No Name, Instead I Am “The Old Lady”
Traveling Salesmen Are Not To Be Trusted
Dinner was Ruined so we Threw it Out and Ate Nothing Instead
13. Someone Is Going To Have To Shoot The Dog Before It Reaches The Courthouse
Noooo, not Biscuit!
#SaveBiscuit #NewEvidence #TheJudgeIsAlmost90AndHisSecretMightAsWellComeOutAtThisPoint
Ok, but 10. We Bury Our Feelings And Our Relatives Alive is just a truth bomb for everyone.
12 is going on my tombstone.
18. I Lost My Virginity at the Tent Revival
19. Uh-Oh, that Baby Is Black
20. I Wouldn’t Have Used No Cob*
* actual quote form Sanctuary <hworf>
The bloody corn cob from Sanctuary has fucked with my head for *years*.
I thought I was well versed in SG, but I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no corn cobs…
heads off to look it up….
#valid as to both southern Gothic and life in the south at times.
I Am But A Child Who Only Half-Understands The Horrors Happening Around Me
I want this to be a Lovecraftian tale, honestly. And the child is, idk, the scion of frog-faced cultists? Like all the joys of shame and silence in a family house plus unnameable horrors.
We Are All Good Christian Folk Here, Watching Over The Corpse By Candlelight, As The Sin-Eater Prepares The Midnight Supper
Oh this was me this wkd though… “I Drink Because This House Is Filthy And All The Servants Have Fled”
TWIST!– there were never any servants
I keep telling the cats they need to start doing some chores around here but they just wriggle on the ground and mew adorably.
For some brand new Southern gothic-y Weird Fiction, check out Betsy Phillips’ The Wolf’s Bane. Loooove that book.
Nellie sure is glum since that preacherman left town all sudden. Heavy, too.
thank you, really needed this intelligent chortling break in my dae
Mother is Napping, Play Quietly and Don’t Talk About Thing
We Certainly Don’t Mention The Thing To Outsiders
Dammit, Child! You Spilled About The Thing And Now We’ll Lose The Farm
You Know How Mother is When She Has One of Her Headaches
I’ve posted this in an open thread before but this Southern Gothic playlist is pretty incredible: http://8tracks.com/verabeara/god-s-gonna-cut-you-…
YES THANK YOU THIS IS GREAT
I have a weird mental association whenever I hear “southern gothic” to the hilariously terse interview Donna Tartt (seemingly begrudgingly) gives at the back of my copy of The Secret History, when the interviewer is like “It’s been called Southern Gothic meets the Brat Pack,” and she deadpans “I am puzzled as to how a book taking place entirely in New England could be considered southern gothic,” and her disdain just oozes through the declarative sentence.
/tangent
Maybe the review was from Canada?
This Crumbling Mansion Is Where I Shall Build My Zeppelin Armada What? Oh I Thought This Was Steampunk, Sorry
I am totally here for Southern Gothic steampunk.
How is that not yet a thing?
With all the mashups out there (e.g. “Android Karenina”), if it hasn’t happened yet, it will happen any minute now.
“A Good Clockwork Robot is Good to Find,” or “The Steam and the Fury.”
Cheri Priest, ya’ll.
In re: #3, one of my favorite parts of Wise Blood is this line: “Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.” In my copy of Flannery’s masterpiece, I’ve scrawled various markings of delight and the words “SPIN OFF PLZ!!”
Not unlike Ignatius Reilly’s mother storing her nippy bottle of sherry in the oven.
Reading that made my day.
My favorite Flannery line:
“Mrs. Hopewell had bad qualities of her own, but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.”
You Will Take A Wrong Turn At The Tree Just Outside Of Town And It Won’t End Well.
See also: Everyone was Polite, Way Too Polite.
oh hai if any of you like your Southern Gothic in poetry form this is for you: https://sites.google.com/a/newmyths.com/nmwebsite…
there is only so long you can stare into a hole
in a darkening street before the mind wanders
to someplace abysmal, hears whispers of
Russians choking on German death
the color and taste of the Divine Sarah’s
gangrenous leg, every unattended woman
Typhoid Mary undercover, the apocalyptic portent
of six months of relentless locusts in the Holy Land
a buzzing swarm in his ears, something like
a knot of snakes down in the dark—
…
laid out in First Presbyterian’s shadow,
friends and onlookers gathered
like mourners at graveside,
stink of exhaust mingled with
moonshine, copper, testosterone, dirt,
old mold, something sharp as ozone.
…
and when they came to him warm and sweet
flushed with tent-sweat, all over blessedness,
pure as virgins whatever they knew,
they were sent from God, not that rotten
scaly devil coiled around every clear mason jar,
every amber bottle from Lexington and Lynchburg
out to Nutbush and Bucksnort,
no snake-whispers in their holy mammal moans.
…
Yes. Yes, that’s the stuff.
*blush* thank you.
More southern gothicry from me here and here, if the crossroads devil is your style.
I never told anybody this before but
my cousin’s girlfriend’s brother John plays guitar
for a band called Infernatus. (He’s not a Satanist.
Just a metalhead.)…
the strings on that statue were humming,
those metal fingers were plucking ’em.
I kept looking for the camera,
the hidden microphone, the gimmick.
The old man, still picking, says
Son, all mistakes are intentional, dontcha know?
More Stuff. Thanks for sharing them!
Thanks for reading! You can see my other things at my site which is just my name dot com. <3
It’s all going to hell
in Pierce-Arrows and shirtsleeves and
soft work, tearing up my walk,
filling up my hole.
The desk officer knew Meemaws,
had a Mamaw of his own, assumed
the drunk’s swelled jaw was swallowing
his consonants. Some always will
call out for grandmother in their hurt
“Brother, when I reach for the bottle now
I see the devil like a ball of snakes
wrapped up around it. I smell people’s
livers dying. Now I know
what hell smells like.”
and anyway, said the grandmothers,
they’ll marry each other, see if they don’t.
I feel like I could go on quoting and quoting. It’s the stuff, all right.
<3
Why is my sister not a virgin?
Wherever did her boyfriend go? And what is that smell coming from her house?
Never take off your wooden leg for a stranger
Or a friend, honestly.
Y’ALL. Is this ever the audience for this:
My survey of around thirty prominent twentieth-century southern authors has led me to conclude, without fear of refutation, that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked of any literary text and whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting, and final. The test is: Is there a dead mule in it?
From Jerry Leath’s expanded version of his essay “Equine Gothic.” It is exactly what you think, and it is fabulous.
I just read the linked article and very much enjoyed it. He’s not wrong…
I hate to be negative on a fun post like this, but you used a picture of Flannery O’Connor….
I knew Flannery O’Connor (yes, I am old and yet I still read The Toast), and I can assure you, that as peculiar as you may wish to think she was (she was not actually peculiar at all), “gothic” is not at all the right description of her writings. “Black humor”, o.k. “Grotesque” maybe. But not “gothic” as it is commonly used today.
???
The distinction lies in what is revealed and what is implied. Southern Gothic’s power lies in implying horror. Grotesque’s power lies in revealing it. O’Connor revealed.
Yeah, I was replying to the commenter so totally missing what we’re talking about yet totally confident in having the *correct* knowledge.
“The Southern Gothic style is one that employs the use of macabre, ironic events to examine the values of the American South. Thus unlike its parent genre, it uses the Gothic tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South – Gothic elements taking place in a magic realist context rather than a strictly fantastical one.
Warped rural communities replaced the sinister plantations of an earlier age; and in the works of leading figures such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, the representation of the South blossomed into an absurdist critique of modernity as a whole.”
I think you are perhaps confusing the literary concept of “the gothic” with, like, goths, my dude.
Flannery O’Connor, not being peculiar at all, out walking her peacocks, as people do.
Late at night, the peacocks would scream into the humid darkness. This was all perfectly normal.
Well, I mean, that is normal, for peacocks. Loud-ass fuckers.
UM ACTUALLY let me tell you about the goths and the kids these days
Please please please do Northern Gothic next!! May I request extra Thomas King and Eden Robinson? May just have to pitch it…
And y’all say it like it’s a BAD thing. ;-D
Everyone’s thankful that Grandmama’s old beau decided to just completely disappear as quick as he showed up, instead of revealing those awful secrets about her previous life. Grandmama’s so happy that she made enough meatloaf to feed us all for a month. But my Lord it sure smells funny.
“She Was A Great Beauty In Her Younger Years, But The Magnolias Always Wilt, I Reckon. It’s Almost As If She Represents The Entire American South Or Something.”
I Reckon Everything Changed When That Foreigner Came to Town
Grandfather’s Civil War Glory Haunts Us All
She Silently Hated Her Family Even After They Buried Her
My Attraction to My Sister Means That We Both Have to Die
New Yorker Version: “The day the Brie went rogue.”
“Born white, born wicked.”
“The heavy-breathing patriarchal hand of oppression.”
The Wallpaper Peels Menacingly in the Sinister Humidity
That Johnson Boy’s Simple, But I Think He Saw Us
The Dog Don’t Trust Yankees Any More Than I Do
The Floods of Easter Sunday: Saga about a white trash family named Flood, whose members spread across the barren, gully-scarred land (like floodwater) until a real flood washes them all away one rainy spring weekend.
The Seven-String Guitar: Dense, multi-voiced, tense-shifting narrative about the final days of a textile mill strike, as told by a blues musician who has blinded himself.
The Dust We Breathe: A preacher addicted to arsenic, a schoolteacher addicted to laxatives, a shopkeeper addicted to cough syrup, a politician addicted to alcohol, a lawyer addicted to . . .
He Always Hit Her, So We Cooked Him Into the Bar-B-Que.
Don’t Make Eye Contact With Mama While The Train’s Passing
Awkward Confession #1: My husband and I have nine indoor cats. Awkward Confession #2: We have assigned the cats roles in an ongoing Tennessee Williams/William Faulkner dramedy/soap opera involving shiftless repressed gay brothers, a crazy uncle locked away, the enterprising young female, unreconciliable sibling rivalries, etc. Cats have a natural talent for Southern Gothic. This could probably be converted to a telenovela with some cultural adjustments.
When I was younger my best friend and I used to do this with the ducks in the canal!
PS I think you and your husband might be soul mates.
What, no “The night the hogs ate Willie, Momma died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister”? http://www.patconroy.com/articles_aba-85.php
The Rain, Heat and Humidity are Sinister and Terribly Symbolic.
The Escaped Convicts are Definitely Going to Rape Us
Yeah, I was replying to the commenter so totally missing what we're talking about yet totally confident in having the *correct* knowledge.
I date my love of bourbon to watching The Long, Hot Summer at a susceptible age, so there definitely has to be something about barn burning in there too.
We Don't Take Kindly to Strangers Around These-Here Parts
This Outwardly Pleasant Congregation Oozes with Hypocrisy
That Time Someone Was Nice to the Town's Only Black Family, And the Hideous Consequences
The Landmark That Was Essential to My Childhood is Being Destroyed to Put Up a Piggly-Wiggly Because Progress is Harsh and Inevitable
By Unspoken Mutual Agreement, We Will Mourn the Town's Matriarch, Each in Our Own Way
The Traitor Who Went to the Big City and No Longer Speaks in Dialect
We Are Only At This Funeral to See Who Inherits Mama's Chiffarobe
Why Must You Ruin This Family Dinner With Accusations of Incest, Adelaide?
Celia Anne Disgraced the Family by Serving Pink Lemonade to the Junior League