Genres
Southern Gothic
Gothic fiction set in the American South, where social trauma, poverty and violence replace the ruined castles of the European tradition.
Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, music, film, theatre and television set in the American South and influenced by Gothic fiction. Where the classic Gothic showed a barbaric past intruding on the present, the Southern mode depicts the persistence of social trauma in the reconstructed South: the decayed plantation replaces the ruined castle, and its machinery is the legacy of slavery, racism, poverty, madness and violence. Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and Erskine Caldwell anchor the shelf.
The genre's furniture is grotesque characters, derelict settings and blurred lines between victim and villain, with the supernatural often left ambiguous against hoodoo and folk magic. For novelists the horror is sociological rather than spectral, which makes the setting's buried history, what each family knows and when they learned it, the continuity a long book or serial must keep straight.