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Dawn Major of Team Gay Explores Supernaturalism in Southern Author and Artist, William Gay

Dawn Major of Team Gay Explores Supernaturalism in Southern Author and Artist, William Gay

I was in graduate school pursuing my MFA in Creative Writing when I found my way to William Gay’s works. I was interested in writing in the horror genre and saw that Stephen King had named Twilight as his top horror pick for 2007 for Entertainment Weekly. What William did in Twilight was similar to what Angela Carter did with her collection of short stories—The Bloody Chamber. William basically rewired two fairy tales, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel,” giving them a modern twist, but he also recognized that at the heart of a true fairy tale there is an element of terror.

I did not come to Gay through the “normal” channels which would be to first read William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and then gravitate to Cormac McCarthy. I have read these authors and admire them, but not to the extent I have read Gay. Now, when I read them, it is always with an eye on how their works impacted Gay. Gay is regularly compared to these wonderful Southern authors, and rightfully so. But there is more than meets the eye with Gay, specifically because of the sheer number of references he makes to the supernatural and the dark imagery that permeates his pages. The general consensus is Gay was writing a gritty lyrical realism—sometimes referred to Grit Lit, a more general term would be Southern Gothic. I was surprised that there were hardly any academic articles on his writing and nothing that suggested he was writing speculative fiction.

I decided to write my master critical thesis— A Southern Mythology: An Exploration of the Supernatural in the Works of William Gay—on supernaturalism in Gay’s works. I argued that, in addition to being a wonderful Southern Gothic writer, William belongs on the shelves of authors of horror, dark fantasy, and magical realism, that he was building a Southern legendarium with his fictional town of Ackerman’s Field and his haunted forest, the Harrikin. The fact that Gay returned to the same settings and even the same characters as well as painting and mapping out his literary landscape supported my argument.

As part of my research for my thesis, I contacted the William Gay Archive and started interviewing J.M. White, the lead archivist and biographer. He was a good friend of Gay’s and now I count Michael and his wife, Susan McDonald, who is also on the team working on the archive, as good friends. After I had finished my master thesis and graduated, I continued writing and lecturing about Gay. I was hooked! I joined Team Gay which consists of a group of scholars, professors, poets, authors, and philosophers, and I have had the great honor of assisting with editing and publishing Gay’s posthumous works.

William Gay passed away in 2012; I never got the chance to meet him, but I feel like I know him. If you read—and I mean deeply read an author like I have with Gay—you inherit a small piece of his soul. I like to imagine he would be pleased with the work I have done and with Team Gay’s work. He was dangerously close to being one of those lost voices had it not been for the efforts of the team. Though, after bringing out four posthumous novels and a collection of short stories, we are at the end of publishing his works, it is just the beginning.

Supernaturalism versus Realism

Gay has been cast amongst the best Southern Gothic writers of his time, and respectively, his works belong on the same shelf with William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Carson McCullers, but he could easily share space with Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub. Categorically, Little Sister Death, was Gay’s primary, speculative fiction novel. He set out to author a horror genre novel inspired by a popular southern haunting—The Legend of the Bell Witch. His interest in the paranormal is evident by his two visits to Adams, Tennessee to visit the Bell Witch Haunting, and his writing of the short memoir, “The Queen of the Haunted Dell—An Authenticated History of the Night the Bell Witch Followed Us Home.” In the memoir Gay provides possible explanations for the family curse from the land being “located on an ancient source of power…” once inhabited by Native Americans, to “It was black magic…” to being a complete hoax, or “It’s true as told, and in the world as we know there is no explanation” (144-145). In the end Gay decided that “…the world is a strange and wondrous place. There are mysteries on every side if you care to look” (Gay 155-156) and left it at that. The memoir ends with a comical story about Gay’s uncle who visited the Bell Witch Homestead and Cave along with Gay. The uncle claimed the ghost followed him home and was now haunting him. Gay agreed to spend the night at his uncle’s home—more to save face than to substantiate his uncle’s fears—and Gay claimed to have

heard “…a chuckle, a soft, malicious chuckle of just a few seconds’ duration” (154-155). Gay was definitely openminded when it came to the paranormal and judging by the amount of ghosts, witches, and fortune tellers populating his narratives, he was more than somewhat intrigued.

Since it has already been established that Little Sister Death is a horror novel, this article will offer an alternative view into Gay’s other novels: The Long Home, Provinces of Night, Twilight, Stoneburner, The Lost Country, and Fugitives of the Heart. In fact, Gay’s short story collections—Wittgenstein’s Lolita and The Ice Man, Time Done Been Won’t Be No More, I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down, and Stories From the Attic—are peppered with his dark poetic language. The magnitude of supernaturalism in Gay’s novels vary. Twilight is a blend of horror and dark fantasy. Provinces of Night, with its disturbed antagonist who has the power to hex, leans towards the psychological horror subgenre. In Stoneburner, supernaturalism plays less of part throughout the narrative but impacts the ending; there is a fortune teller character whose predictions come true. In The Lost Country, Gay explores the subgenre of horror, monster horror, with a devil or demon as an antagonist. With Fugitives of the Heart something otherworldly is at play, but supernaturalism is less overt and is used for dark imagery or to create a mythic landscape. That is not to say supernaturalism in these novels is simply a stylistic choice enhancing Gay’s dark lyrical language or his tone—

though certainly those literary elements are a constant in Gay’s oeuvre. The latter novels fall more in line with magical realism in that they are largely realistic narratives with the occasional unexplainable magical event, for example, a hex that proves true. Magical realism does not fit an exact mold, but some of the most accepted characteristics such as the weaving of local legend, folklore and fables into real settings, time distortion, and a narrative voice that presents the unexplainable in a nonchalant manner are present in these novels. Or it is what it is and as long as the characters accept their reality, whether distorted to the reader or not, then the reality is true.

The principal reason for reconsidering Gay’s realism as speculative fiction stemmed from the repeated allusions to the supernatural and matter-of-fact breaks from realism into the fantastic. With a renewed vision of Gay’s works the reader can read his text from multiple perspectives. Gay’s supernaturalism is not a subversive facet meant to be explained away or discredited by elderly, delusional, or mad characters, but ought to be celebrated for the richness it adds to Gay’s body of work, the Southern literary canon, as well as to magical realism, horror, and fantasy genres.

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