Read This Book: Southern Gothic Novels

READ THIS BOOK

Southern Gothic Novels

Recommendations from Lee Rozelle

University of Montevallo Professor of English Southern Gothic novels give readers a glimpse at the dark side, a chance to experience strange characters and haunted places from the safety of our comfy homes. They give us opportunities to explore our own demons and face the monster, even when that monster is us. At the University of Montevallo, my students and I have studied Gothic masterpieces from “The Fall of the House of Usher” to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and here are some of our favorites, including one of my own.

Wise Blood

by Flannery O’Connor

Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor makes me cackle and cringe at the same time. Her debut novel is rich with dark satire and cutting humor, disappointment with the modern world and profound pity for it. After his release from the military, Hazel Motes turns into an atheist street preacher in an absurd and horrifying struggle with his own beliefs. To promote his “Church Without Christ,” a mummified dwarf is swiped by Enoch Emery, a troubled young man who impersonates movie star gorilla.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Jojo in this novel breaks my heart. His mother neglects him, his father is in prison, and he must take care of his three-year-old sister Kayla on his own. He and the other characters in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage,

Mississippi, are haunted by drugs, poverty and backwoods racism. They are also haunted by ghosts. Jojo’s mother Leonie sees the phantasmic presence of brother Given, and Jojo is followed by the ghost of a boy who was cruelly murdered in Parchman prison. Apparitions wait in the tall trees.

Twilight

by William Gay

It’s fitting that the creepiest novel on this list begins with a wagon full of corpses and a rural graveyard pocked with exhumed caskets. William Gay’s Twilight revolves around the dreadful plots of Fenton Breece, a mortician whose ghoulish habits will keep even the heartiest reader up at night. After witnessing the undertaker stealing a family burial vault, Tyler and his sister discover that Breece has been mutilating the bodies of the people he buries. A blackmail plot ensues, and an assassin is hired. Then things get really, really bad.

The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

I love this novel because it mixes Southern Gothic with speculative fiction in a hilarious epic struggle between man and hog. When middle-aged taxidermist Romie Futch becomes a research subject in the shady Center for

Cybernetic Neuroscience, he becomes both super genius and guinea pig, his middle-aged brain now brilliant beyond comprehension. Troubled by errant downloads that track his thoughts and actions, Romie turns taxidermy into pop art as he hunts down the legendary super pig “Hogzilla.”

Ballad of Jasmine Wills

by Lee Rozelle

While channel surfing, I saw a commercial where people were eating worms for the reality TV program Fear

Factor. I thought, “Why would somebody watch worm eating for entertainment? What would I eat for all that media attention?” These questions compelled me to write a book where an overweight banker is kidnapped and made the star of reality TV show called Diet Extreme. Locked inside a studio in the middle of the Alabama woods, Jasmine is tortured with fancy food, brainwashed with self-help videos and badgered with exercise routines for her growing mass of livestream fans.