The familiar can be as comforting as it is stifling. Much of the charm of small towns in literature and broader culture is the familiarity between people and place—the ability to walk down the street and know store owners and passersby. The small towns in Southern Gothic literature ask us: When do we get so comfortable with the familiar that we stop seeing a place’s problems? What, if anything, can we do to address a problem once we’ve accepted it as a fact of life? It is not uncommon in a Southern Gothic small town to spot a ghost, a relative, or to encounter a family that has been steeped in the land for generations. Often, the Southern Gothic is where magical realism and structural innovation find exciting life as these tools are used by writers to think about facade, lineage, and legacy.
When I began writing my debut novel, Girls with Long Shadows, I wanted to locate the story somewhere familiar yet distant from my own experiences. I settled on a fictional South Texas town: Longshadow. In the novel, a set of identical triplet girls live with their brother and grandmother on a decrepit golf course as their need to escape the small town grows to become insurmountable and, eventually, dangerous. Neighbors gossip, families fight, and the sisters swim up and down a brackish bayou to bridge the gap between the golf course and their community. The townspeople of Longshadow speak in a united, pessimistic chorus of vignettes as the sisters wonder who amongst them they can trust, and if they can even trust each other? And yes, there’s a ghost (or two). While Longshadow may not be real on a map, my hope is that it honors the small towns of the Southern Gothic genre before it, many of which are mentioned here.
So here are 7 books about the small-town Southern Gothic and the creature comforts and ghosts that inhabit it.
a little bump in the earth by Tyree Daye
In Daye’s third poetry collection, he re-casts photos, documents, and oral histories of his family’s centuries-long presence in Youngsville, North Carolina with meticulous reverence. The collection revels in family lore and intimacy, maximizing the resonance of each punctuation mark. It is deliciously impossible to pick a favorite, but in vain, I point to poems like “Jimmy Always Was” and the middle section, a little museum in the herein-&-after as stand outs. The collection ends with “instructions for taking the hill with you” which tells us to “Come back soon.” With a little bump in the earth, Daye gives an unreturnable gift, allowing readers into the nourishing familiarity of his family and giving them permission to take it with.
Ferris Beach by Jill McCorkle
NC Literary Hall of Fame-er Jill McCorkle’s Ferris Beach catalogues the teenage years of only-child Katie Burns, who lives with her family in Ferris Beach. Katie grows close to a new girl in the neighborhood, and warily nurses a curiosity for a local misfit boy. In orbiting coming-of-independence and youthful curiosity, Ferris Beach considers the sanctity of the family unit, the family home, and the hometown. Nobody captures the small-town south like McCorkle.
I read this book for the first time last July in the middle of a hundred-degree summer and a five-day power outage after a hurricane. It buoyed me.
Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
What might seem a docile premise for this Tony award winning play—cleaning out a problematic southern patriarch’s home after his passing—spirals in the hands of the Lafayette family. A troubling artifact is found in the decrepit Arkansas plantation mansion, forcing the family to confront a problematic history and long-buried tensions. The play format creates a beautifully effective contrast between poetic stage directions and tight, overlapping dialogue as family members shout over one another to be heard. The confinement to home, its walls reeking with atrocities of the past, both honors the play-format’s need to keep action centralized whilst exacerbating friction between siblings, cousins, and community. Italicized cicada trills captured in jar-like parentheticals inflect an undeniable, compounding eeriness that builds to a shocking ending.
Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
The collection’s titular first poem “Song” is iconic, spinning the tale of a goat head that begins to sing after being cut off by young boys. Though Pegeen Kelly’s poetic voice is supple and precise, an illusive sense of doom gathers throughout the collection. Many poems border on parables, like “Song” and “Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone.” All consider how the eerie peace of the pastoral can be disrupted and defaced by people: “My mother / gathers gladiolas. The gladness / is fractured.” Every poem is a magnified stop along a foreboding yet beautiful country backroad where animals become artifacts, humans commit crimes against the land, and a calm, melodic voice captures it all.
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Impending Hurricane Katrina barrels toward coastal Bois Sauvage, Mississippi and coops fourteen-year-old Esch in her childhood home with an emotionally distant father, an older brother and his prized pit bull China, and the phantom of their beloved late mother. The family boards up their home and Esch turns to Greek literature as she reckons with a secret that threatens to combust while the storm rages. Esch’s friends, lovers, and memories cling to trees as high-wind waters aim to sweep them away. Salvage the Bones not only renders the terrifying volatility of a category 5 hurricane, but paints a raw, honest portrait of burgeoning womanhood, motherhood, and survival.
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson
Wilson’s debut short story collection glistens with realistic quirk as its giant eye roams across odd pockets of the South. There are sorters at the Scrabble factory, old friends, new friends, and many odd couples–a Worst Case Scenario, Inc. actuary and young mother, a cheerleader pyromaniac. The stories are set on the fascinating fringes of southern society. In the title story, the narrator recounts his group’s efforts to dig to the center of the earth, saying, “So we went sideways,” which is the favored direction of each story. With deftly precise and surreal premises, and an unforgettable amount of spontaneous combustion–literally–the collection asks: how deep do things go? Devotion, devastation, and yes, even the Earth.
A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan
The Southern Gothic genre loves its ghosts, but I’ve scarce encountered apparitions stranger than those that lurk Kenan’s fictional town of Tims Creek. The novel centers a young Horace Cross reckoning with his sexuality and race as a gay, black teenager in the fictional Tims Creek, a rural North Carolina town where the Cross family has lived for generations. Ghosts taking the shapes of animals and Horace himself haunt the young man as he spends a distressing evening wandering parts of his hometown stamped with his family name, praying, yearning, and battling. Kenan’s Tims Creek is a vibrant, difficult character, a landscape the late author returned to in other fictional works. The town itself becomes a way of looking closely at the South, its historical complicities, and its contemporary ones too.
