Southern Noir or the Ghosts of Language: An Exclusive Guest Post from S.A. Cosby, Author of Razorblade Tears

I was born in the former capitol of the Confederacy and I’ve lived in rural Virginia most of my life. Books about the South have always held a special and complicated place in my heart. In between the covers of those tomes, I often recognized the ecstasy and the heartache that was intrinsic to the characters even as most of those characters did not look like me. Flannery O’Conner said the South is Christ haunted and I think the best of Southern Noir Fiction takes that idea and deconstructs then puts it back together in a new form. A form that can bear the weight of the dichotomous idea of a region that clings to religion and moral rigidity even as it tries to ignore the horrors of its past and present. There is no place more haunted by its past and afraid of its future than the South. But out of that fear, many writers and artists are able to forge a bridge between the hypocrisy of disingenuous morality that is just as much a foundation of the Southern experience as is family loyalty and deep connection to the land and the dusty angels of our better nature that are waiting to help us embrace the reality of a New South.
When I think of writers that are traversing that bridge, I think of Steph Post and her Judah Cannon series that takes us to the sweltering environs of the Florida/Georgia state line. Lightwood being my personal favorite. Or Ace Adkins and the Quinn Colson books. Check out The Innocents, a dark haunting tale that evokes “True Detective” season 1. David Joy is a modern bard writing murder ballads in the form of a novel. His most recent book When These Mountains Burn is a somber essay on the pain that lives at the edge of class hierarchies.
Attica Locke’s novels Bluebird, Bluebird  and Heaven, My Home take rural noir and reimagine it through the prism of the African American experience in a way that opened my eyes to the limitless possibilities inherent in the genre.
A few other names you should know if you want a deep understanding of the South and the beauty and grotesqueness that lives side by side here like church yards and juke joints: Brian Panowich, Eryk Pruitt, Laura McHugh and Wiley Cash.
To me, Southern and Rural Noir is the genre that most adroitly addresses the things that seem to be at the core of many of our most polarizing issues: race, class and sex. That’s the Holy Trinity of Southern fiction and the foundation of Southern and Rural Noir, and it’s something that I find endlessly fascinating and infinitely necessary.