Content note: references to ableism and racism

For people born in the South, whether they remain in the region their entire lives or not, there can be an inexplicable hold the land has on you. Almost like soft fingers grasping an ankle—until that hand tightens to prevent escape. That’s what Southern gothic literature is like. Genteel and civil at first glance. Harmless. Soft. But underneath is something harder. Violent. Irrational.

Like its predecessor, gothic literature, there is something unsettling in Southern gothic. In the shadows wait unrelenting tension, dark secrets, acts of violence, or nature’s fury.

Edgar Allen Poe is widely viewed as the father of American gothic fiction, and it’s easy to see why. His writing recalled early gothic novels like Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto.

Like many of the works that influenced his, Poe’s stories are populated by specters, murderers, and “madmen.” The constant sense of unease and dread that permeates gothic stories lived on as the genre began to flourish in the South. Though fantastical elements like hauntings don’t have to exist in Southern gothic, there is often a feeling of not-quite-rightness. It’s the ugliness simmering beneath pretty surfaces that is a hallmark of this genre. In many cases, the characters are much worse than any terrors that come crawling from a cemetery. Horrifying violence erupts without warning, and the aftermath may not feature the type of justice readers expect. Instead, there might be grudging acceptance, at least as a facade. And if there’s vengeance to be had, it’s taken by family members, not the law.

Southern gothic emerged in a Reconstruction era environment, a world wrecked by the hubris of its own sons. Decaying mansions, particularly plantation houses in states of collapse, feature heavily. And that decay infects the people inside those homes, whose ancestors enslaved Black people, ancestors whose racism often spread like a cancer through their descendants. In a landscape where so much blood was shed, it’s not surprising that many places across the South feel haunted, as if the ghosts of past incidents hang around, unable to let go. As expressed in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Every culture has its superstitions, and in this case, Southern is a culture. The blue paint that graces front doors and porches—popularly known as haint blue—is as ubiquitous in some areas as magnolia bushes. Newspaper-covered walls weren’t only a poor person’s insulation; it’s believed that keeping spirits busy with all that reading distracts them from haunting you. Knowing the history of the land, is it any wonder that so many superstitions in the South revolve around keeping ghosts away?

Other common elements of Southern gothic include magic, particularly hoodoo practitioners, or conjure men or conjure women. Ghosts, mental illness, and religious fanaticism can factor in as well, all in a singularly Southern way that grounds the story in the particular region that defines the genre. But what makes the South so well-suited for literature full of the macabre and weird?

Anyone who’s intimately familiar with a sleepy Southern town knows just how busy it can be. A casual observer might not recognize the action, but natives will. It’s there in the conversations, both quiet and loud, held on porches and in church halls. It lives in the backwoods, where children roam on their way to fish at the river’s edge during the day and a man is beaten and killed during the night.

Then there is the environment. The moss-heavy trees, the endless fields that used to be full of cotton plants, so much white that it looked like clouds settling on the soil. The unrelenting humidity offers its own special hell. In the South, beauty and brutality exist side by side.

The violence sometimes surprises, but should it, considering the region’s vicious history? The ground is soaked with blood from beatings, lynchings, whippings, and torture. In Southern gothic, violence may simply be a case of reaping what one sows, and the ground spitting back what it’s been fed.

Mixed in with the horror is a dark humor, in the same league as backhanded compliments. Sometimes whispered, other times said outright, the insults are slick and uttered in typical Southern fashion: with a smile.

However, not all stories set in the South are Southern gothic. It’s more than simply the setting. It’s the wholeness of it: the characters behaving in ways distinctly shaped by living there; the regional dialect; the way the past frames the present. It’s the people and the places that are the standouts in Southern gothic. Characters stripped of everything but their pride, or those unfairly relegated to the outskirts of society while simultaneously being the most honest and upright in the entire story. Places that are little more than huge expanses of nothingness.

Even in stories that contain no speculative elements, there are things stranger and scarier than any magic spell. There is a brokenness, in the setting and the people. Characters like Boo Radley and Blanche DuBois, with their oddness and eccentricity. Grotesque characters and good breeding present a juxtaposition in a world where Southern hospitality means greeting an enemy with a smile, behind which clenched teeth grate.

Like much of speculative fiction, Southern gothic shines a critical light on societal imbalances and hypocrisy. The literature makes a statement, whether it’s about racial injustice or the othering of characters who don’t fit societal norms. The real villains are often those who appear dignified on the surface but commit horrible acts behind closed doors. So while Southern gothic isn’t always horror, at least not in horror’s typical accepted definition, there is usually an undercurrent of dread. There don’t need to be ghosts and witches present; the characters and their actions are more horrifying than a spirit floating down the stairs.

The “respectable” characters practice -isms—racism, ableism, classism—under the thin veneer of politeness. An ugliness resides within them, and not always buried deeply. But when they mistreat those they consider lesser than, it’s evident that Southern gothic writers can differentiate between the villain and the innocent.

Just like today, early Southern gothic featured the outsider, typically in characters who had a disability that in modern society has a name. But over half a century ago, Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois was simply “mad” and scandalously promiscuous. The antisocial misfit or outcast was shunned for their rejection of societal norms. Among those norms was heterosexuality. Williams’s subtle inclusion of gay themes in his work was its own statement; the famous playwright couldn’t be openly gay during a time when sexual repression was yet another norm.

Traditionally recognized Southern gothic writers included Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner, formidable giants in the genre whose works reflected a range of themes and tragedies, including spirituality, incest, rape, and murder. These writers were mostly white, and Black characters were written through a white lens. When Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, with Black characters speaking in a manner that was especially recognizable to African Americans across the South, the book was criticized for this dialectal realism. Hurston’s novel can take some getting used to for readers unversed in the ways Black Southerners communicate, but the authenticity in this particular novel is what sets it apart.

Despite major Black characters almost never figuring heavily in this era’s Southern gothic, Black people were always there in a way they weren’t in stories set in the North. Because for much of the South’s history, enslaved Black people lived among white people, sometimes as part of their biological families. Black women cared for white children, at times at the expense of their own. They acted as wet nurses and caregivers to white children and women, and suffered abuses at the hands of white men. In early Southern gothic, Black characters were portrayed in the menial roles of their real-life counterparts, from the taciturn Tobe in A Rose for Emily to many nameless and mostly faceless men, women, and children scattered throughout those stories as so much backdrop.

As the 20th century progressed, later names in Southern gothic literature included Cormac McCarthy (although Child of God is probably the most fitting for the genre) and Michael McDowell. In the vein of Hurston came Alice Walker, with The Color Purple being her best-known novel. The late Gloria Naylor didn’t always write about the South, but her Tempest-influenced Mama Day is an amazing entry in the genre (despite some of the novel taking place in New York), with its folk magic and devastating hurricane.

Although some literary critics believe that Southern gothic literature died out after the Civil Rights Movement, I don’t believe that to be true. Especially considering the modern writers inhabiting the space. There is a whole new generation of writers with fresh takes on this genre, bringing underrepresented voices to the forefront. We’d be wise to remember Faulkner’s words about the past, as a past that can be examined anew. Racism scrutinized by someone who looks like an oppressor will be handled differently when written by an author who descended from the oppressed.

The publishing industry can be slow to progress, which explains the decades-long lack of well-known Southern gothic writers who weren’t white and almost exclusively male. In recent years, however, the genre has included more women, like Delia Owens and Karen Russell, and women and people of color, such as Eden Royce, Jesmyn Ward, Erin Roberts, and Rivers Solomon, who present a worldview vastly different than the white male authors of past eras. And in that different viewpoint, their exploration of themes typical of the genre reveals a wholly unique side not previously revealed—that of characters written by authors whose own lives and experiences inform their creation.

As long as writers—whether they’ve hailed from generations of Southerners or merely adopted the region as their own—undertake the grand work of exploring and unearthing the South’s secrets and truths, in its curious combination of the good, the bad, and the ugly, Southern gothic will always have a place.