Setting the Gothic Scene in the South

I’ve lived my whole life in the South. I was raised in north Florida (trust me, still the South), went to school and to work here. My yard has trees with Spanish moss, my kids say “ya’ll” and “fixin’ to.” I’m looking to buy a new pickup truck. 

(Creating a Sense of Place in Fiction.)

It’s not that we in the South are necessarily obsessed with the grotesque, decay, and the supernatural, but there’s a reason “Southern Gothic” is defined in Wikipedia. My novel just out, Boy With Wings, deals with all of the above: It’s about a boy, well, with wings, who ends up in a freak show traveling the South in the 1930s.

Every story, every film, every book is a series of scenes; it’s the framework that moves the story on. Sometimes a scene is a flashback to an earlier period, sometimes chronological movements of a character through space. A Civil War story might intersperse battle scenes with down time: Think The Red Badge of Courage. 

The very best Southern Gothic novels, to me, put you immediately in the South. Often that’s through optic means: Spanish moss (see above), Rebel flags, clay, and bugs. Sometimes through sound: banjos, cicadas, muffler-less muscle cars. 

One of the most underused methods is via smell: There are a number of very southern smells. In my book, the boy Johnny lives for a time in a turpentine camp, and there is the smell of wet pine needles, the burnt sugary syrup scent. Collard greens cooking has a very distinctive smell.

There’s also a sense of the otherworldly in such novels from the start. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which I would argue is Southern Gothic (and literature in general) at its finest, begins: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” You know from the get-go that things are a bit dark and ominous. Boy With Wings begins with a faked death, a boy placed in a casket. As a reader, you’re put into conflict right away, and hopefully bought into the plight of the character(s) from that point onward.

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Dialogue is also an effective way to set things in course, but a little goes a long way. There’s the conflict, of course, between the way people actually talk—few in the South speak the Queen’s English—and overburdening the reader with colloquialisms that are distracting. 

I know, I know: You want to accurately reflect speech, but here’s how Larry Brown (another of the masters) does it in Fay:

Note that the speakers’ incorrect grammar points you southward, but Brown doesn’t attempt to make “nothing” “nothin’” (even though that’s the way a Southerner probably would say it). Less can be more. Is more, in this case.

Maybe, though I find that most authors play around the dark edges, invert tropes or outlooks or push things farther out. That’s what so interests me. There are any number of ways to be dark and eerie, and any number of ways to describe life in the South. You can start life in a casket. I’d like to read them all.    

Check out Mark Mustian's Boy With Wings here:

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