![]() ![]() Tom Robinson, for example, the black man accused of raping a white woman in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, has a lame left hand. Scholars are quick to call them “grotesques”, as they are often deformed or bigoted or violent but, in the hands of a southern writer, they are written with empathy and truth. The basket on this bike is full of vivid characters. The southern gothic is, always, from the culture. To put it more smartly, there is a difference between writing from the culture and writing about or, at its worst, above it. ![]() Show me a southern gothic novel written by someone who’s not from the south and the odds are that I’ll show you a bad novel. It’s a family thing an intimacy that readers from anywhere can relate to. What makes this crucial to the southern gothic is similar to what makes a brother able to poke fun at his sister while beating up anyone else who dares make fun of her. These are writers who spend their imaginative energy on the “postage stamp” of soil beneath their feet writers who know, in other words, of what they speak. Look at the places the aforementioned “gods” of the genre are from. What steers the southern gothic is authenticity. It is instead a kinship in the way the two things are assembled and ornamented. (Note: this is not simply because southerners talk too slowly for a car metaphor to work. Here’s my idea: the southern gothic is like a trusty bicycle. And, now that my novel is being published in the UK, and with the literary world abuzz about Lee’s forthcoming Go Set a Watchman, I also have to wonder: why is southern gothic literature so popular across the globe? And yet there I was, supposedly, at a cocktail party with some of the writers I most admired: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Barry Hannah, Zora Neale Hurston. I had just tried to tell a story in the best way I knew how. Still, I felt uncomfortable with that phrase “southern gothic”: had I written that kind of novel? The truth is, I hadn’t set out to. The review ended with a proclamation that I have since gleefully memorised: “Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member.”Īs a guy from Louisiana, as deep as the American south gets, this was mighty stuff for my ego. ![]() O n one of the best days of my working life, I read a glowing review of my debut novel My Sunshine Away in Kirkus Reviews, a highly respected journal in America. ![]()
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