Opal has been dreaming of Starling House, but the house seems to have dreams of its own… Starling House by Alix E. Harrow is a brilliant Gothic fantasy which came out earlier this month. With a sentient house, a cursed family, and long-buried secrets rising to the surface, this book puts Kentucky Gothic on the map. Continue reading Review of Starling House—Kentucky Gothic
Category: Southern Gothic
Review of A House with Good Bones—Bugs, Blooms, and Boogeymen
Old houses always have buried secrets. An archeological entomologist is perhaps extra qualified to dig those up—and she’ll need to if she wants to get to the bottom of her mom’s strange behavior in A House with Good Bones, a delightful Southern Gothic by T. Kingfisher which came out back in March. In a fun coincidence, the audiobook for this one is narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal, author of the book I reviewed last week, The Spare Man. Continue reading Review of A House with Good Bones—Bugs, Blooms, and Boogeymen
Intro to Southern Gothic
Since the Gothic first arose as a handful of tales about virginal young women being chased through European castles by usurping noblemen, the genre has splintered off into many different forms, some of which bear very little resemblance to the earliest Gothic stories. One of the best-known off-shoots of this mode of writing is the Southern Gothic. I touched on this topic briefly in my post on the American Gothic Tradition, but now I want to cover it in more depth. Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic literature that is defined both geographically and thematically. Generally set within the southern United States, works of Southern Gothic employ the macabre and the grotesque to expose the myth of the idyllic antebellum South. Common themes include the decay and corruption that exist behind beautiful facades (both physically and metaphorically), the decline of a dispossessed aristocracy, and the scars left by slavery and a long history of racial tensions. If you’ve ever taken an American literature class, it’s likely that you’ve already encountered some Southern Gothic. Below are a few authors best known for writing in this genre: Continue reading Intro to Southern Gothic