Let’s face it: Books are just spookier when they are set in the American South. Maybe it’s the tendrils of Spanish moss hanging from the old live oak trees, the South’s deep and disturbing Civil War and civil rights history that permeates the fabric of the region, that specific shade of “haint blue” paint on porches thought to keep the ghosts away, the hoodoo of the Mississippi Delta, the misty swirl of Florida swampland, or the beautiful ballast stone streets that threaten to twist an ankle. Or maybe it’s the slow way of talking and living and changing. Whatever the combination, setting is a major player in the books listed in this chapter. As you open each of these books, you may feel the hot breath of the Deep South. And it will chill you to the bone.
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
“Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby.”
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Sethe was born a slave. She managed a harrowing escape to Ohio but is haunted by her memories of Sweet Home—the plantation she was forced to work on—and the ghost of her baby, nameless except for the single word she could afford to have etched onto her tombstone: Beloved. Sethe lives with her daughter Denver and her mother-in-law Baby Suggs. Suddenly, a mysterious newcomer arrives and calls herself “Beloved.” Beloved throws things out of balance and soon encapsulates the scars and terror that come from a history of people enslaving people. Profoundly lyrical, this book contains my favorite last two pages in all of literature, including this passage: “By and by all trace is gone … [t]he rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.” Although this isn’t listed in the chapter “Reel Good Books,” I was fascinated to learn about the character treatment Oprah Winfrey gave Sethe before and during the filming of the movie version, including being blindfolded and left in the woods in order to get an inkling of what it had been like for a runaway slave.
The Bottoms (2000) by Joe R. Lansdale
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I’m a sucker for serial killers, mysteries, boogeymen, and coming-of-age stories, and this one contains all four with masterful storytelling. Harry Crane, an eighty-something nursing home resident, tells us about when he was eleven years old in Depression-era East Texas, where a brutal serial killer was on the loose. In fact, he and his sister Thomasina found the body of the first victim in the woods while discussing the legendary boogey creature, the Goat Man. The investigation of the crimes quickly begins to peel back the thin layers of rampant racism and hatred just beneath the surface of the town.
The Cutting Season (2012) by Attica Locke
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Caren, manager of the historic Louisiana plantation turned tourist site Belle Vie, should have known that “one day it would spit out what it no longer had use for, the secrets it would no longer keep.” This certainly seems true when the body of a woman, her throat cut, is found on her watch at the fence line between the plantation and the fields of sugarcane now owned by an ambitious corporation. When Caren learns about the long-ago disappearance of a former slave, she wonders if the deaths are somehow tied across time. The Cutting Season is a multifaceted mystery set against the perfect backdrop of an eerie Southern tourist destination replete with restored slave quarters and Civil War reenactments.
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (2012) by Joshilyn Jackson
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The covers of Jackson’s books make them seem like sweet Southern belle romances, but don’t be fooled—most are dark and twisty tales filled with cuckoo characters who suck you in, chew you up, and spit you out onto the hot Southern asphalt. A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty is the tale of three generations of women from the same Alabama family—Big, forty-five, mother of Liza, thirty, mother of Mosey, fifteen. Family lore says that “Every fifteen years God flicks at us with one careless finger and we spin helplessly off into the darkness.” And it hits: Liza has a stroke and a family mystery involving an unearthed backyard grave begins to unfold. Twists and turns galore! Also listen to her audiobooks, which Jackson, an actress, narrates.
Hell at the Breech (2003) by Tom Franklin
“[E]ver time you do something, no matter what it is, if it’s whacking a croquet ball or catching a fish, ever time you do a thing, the next time it’s a mite easier. And finally you get to be good at catching fish, or playing croquet, or even killing. You get to where you can do it without thinking.”
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This novel is loosely based on the horrific incidents known as the Mitcham War, which occurred mere miles from the author’s childhood home in rural Alabama. In the book, in 1897, a group of white cotton farmers formed a secret society called Hell-at-the-Breech in order to avenge the murder of a public figure. What follows is a mix of fact and fiction based on the nearly forgotten gang that terrorized the town, causing a year-long campaign ending in violence and murder.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) by John Berendt
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This book inspired me to move to the coastal city of Savannah, Georgia, for a year before I started graduate school. It’s every bit as enchanting and bewitching as Berendt portrays. Berendt, a magazine columnist, discovered the beautiful Southern city for himself when he and some friends realized that plane tickets to other cities could be purchased for about the same amount of money as a night out in New York City. So he begins to explore different cities and happens upon Savannah in the midst of the compelling trial of antiques dealer Jim Williams for the murder of his live-in assistant and maybe lover, Danny Hansford. This easy-to-digest true story is about the oddball characters Berendt meets while visiting and chronicling the trial. When I lived there, I heard many rumblings from long-time residents about how the book, which bolstered tourism, was more of a curse than a blessing, but I still encourage everyone I know to visit at least once. Such a beautiful, haunted place!
Mudbound (2008) by Hillary Jordan
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The paradox of black soldiers who came home to racial bigotry and segregation after fighting in World War II is explored in this novel by Hillary Jordan. How could we expect a soldier to fight for justice and then come home to injustice? Perhaps that’s why Mudbound so captivated me. Laura is uneasy on her husband Henry’s Mississippi Delta farm. After the war ends, her brother-in-law, Jamie McAllan, and a black veteran named Ronsel Jackson, the son of the sharecroppers on McAllans’ land, come to work on the farm and become fast friends, much to the chagrin of the townsfolk. Laura is the first to foreshadow the complex and haunting story of what happens in 1946 between the McAllans and the Jacksons: “The truth isn’t so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.” Told in alternating chapters, Mudbound is a winner of the Bellwether Prize for fiction, awarded to a first literary novel that addresses issues of social justice.
Outer Dark (1968) by Cormac McCarthy
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In short, straightforward sentences and chapters, this dark and brooding novel is akin to McCarthy’s The Road in that it’s a bleak journey made on foot, but Outer Dark takes place long ago (before there were cars), somewhere in gritty Appalachia. After bearing her brother Culla’s baby, Rinthy learns that their baby did not in fact die as Culla would have her believe. Rinthy sets off alone to find the baby, who has since been discovered by a traveling tinker. Culla leaves on his own journey to find work and salvation from his sins. There’s also a dangerous gang on the loose. This book probably has the most shocking, horrific ending of any book I’ve ever read. And no one has ever accused me of having a faint heart.
A Quiet Belief in Angels (2007) by R.J. Ellory
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Melodic prose fills this crime novel/family saga that centers on Joseph Vaughan as events from his childhood haunt him throughout his life from age twelve to sixty. He is determined to find the serial murderer of the young girls in his hometown of Augusta Falls, Georgia. Finally, years later, a neighbor is found hanged and surrounded by the murder victims’ possessions. And the killings stop. Joseph goes on with life even as his mother suffers a breakdown and he is later arrested and falsely imprisoned for a decade. When the killings begin again, Joseph learns a startling truth that brings him back into the center of the murders. Illuminating and frightening, this book gave me nightmares the night after I closed the cover. That’s always a sign of a good book in my eyes.
Serena (2008) by Ron Rash
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Serena Pemberton is strong, cunning, and unrelentingly vicious with anyone who threatens her intense life with her new husband in the logging country of Depression-era North Carolina. She’s tough and can log with the best men. And she hunts rattlesnakes. When she learns that she can’t bear children of her own, she sets out to destroy the illegitimate child her husband sired without her. Even though she has been called one of the most ruthless female characters in literature, I find her unapologetic badassery completely appealing. “When a crew foreman asked Doctor Cheney what Mrs. Pemberton would want the snakes for, the physician replied that she milked the fangs and coated her tongue with the poison.” Yep.
A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) by Nelson Algren
“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”
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This American classic that has fallen through the cracks contains every downtrodden character you can picture—thieves, rapists, prostitutes, pimps, addicts, nomads, and the lonesome. Dove Linkhorn is an illiterate drifter set on wandering the Southern countryside after a failed love affair. He bounces from town to town and woman to woman leaving nothing but misery in his wake. The worst of his debauchery culminates in New Orleans and involves a condom factory, a brothel, and a fight to the finish. Some of the most despicable characters in literature can be found within this one book.
Wise Blood (1952) by Flannery O’Connor
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This novel, O’Connor’s first, centers on Hazel Motes, a veteran who returns from World War II to find that his family home in Tennessee has been abandoned. A devoted atheist, he buys a suit and hat and decides to do some anti-religious street preaching. Motes meets a cast of nefarious characters along the way, including a prostitute, a zookeeper, a blind preacher and his nymphomaniac daughter, and a mummified dwarf. The most hilarious scene comes when eventually a con man decides to parody Motes’s anti-religious movement by forming his own ministry, called “The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,” which makes him lots of money and, of course, angers Motes to no end. O’Connor’s only other novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), also deals with religion.