Totally Mad for Southern Gothic? Five Books You’ve Got to Read.

Cane, by Jean Toomer
You know the part in How The Grinch Stole Christmas when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes? I felt like this book did that to me, but for my brain instead of my heart. This work of art from 1923 by a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance is a hybrid of short stories, poetry, and drama that follows African American characters from the South to the North and back again. Yes, there are secrets, untamed passions, and brawls, but it’s the sheer beauty of Jean Toomer’s language and the stark drama of the characters’ struggles that resounds. I can hear the words of Toomer’s poem “Evening Song” ringing in my head decades after I last read it.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt
Every time I see or hear a discussion of Donna Tartt’s published work, which consists almost entirely of three novels, it’s her second novel, The Little Friend, that gets the shaft. Everybody loves the Dionysian rites and murder among Latin-obsessed students at a Vermont liberal arts college in The Secret History, and the tale of a young man hiding his possession of a priceless artwork in The Goldfinch, but when I ask about The Little Friend, set in Mississippi where Tartt grew up, people say they haven’t read it. So I say: read it. It’s got a murder mystery, madness, a plucky child narrator, and charismatic snake handlers. Also there’s a generous variety of shady families in the small town where it’s set: “Little Ratliffs and Scurlees and Odums, these youngsters with their rheumy eyes and pinched faces, their glue-sniffing mothers, their tattooed, fornicating fathers.” What more could a Southern Gothic fan possibly want?

The Ballad of The Sad Café and Other Stories, by Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers stands tall in my personal pantheon of Southern literary divas. The first time I read the title story of this collection, I underlined, circled, or highlighted probably 85 percent of it. It tells the story of Miss Amelia Evans, a wealthy, “slightly cross-eyed,” six-foot-tall café owner who was married for only ten days before spending the rest of her life alone. She falls in love with “a weakly little hunchback reaching only to her waist” named Cousin Lymon. Their mismatched attraction fuels McCuller’s indelible writing about the nature of love.

Provinces of Night, by William Gay
William Gay was a brilliant writer from Tennessee who served in Vietnam, worked as a carpenter, house painter, and drywall hanger, and didn’t publish any of his fiction until he was 58 years old, even though he’d been working on his craft since he was a teenager. In Provinces of Night, it’s 1952 and Boyd Bloodworth’s wife runs off to Detroit with a salesman, leaving him and his teenage son to fend for themselves in a ramshackle house in the Tennessee countryside. Colorful characters, occult curses, and crazy family escapades ensue. James Franco has announced he’ll direct and produce a film version of Gay’s The Long Home, hopefully winning more readers for the terrific writer, who died in 2012.

Welding with Children, By Tim Gautreaux
I first came across Louisiana writer Tim Gautreaux in the Best American Short Stories anthology, which has featured his work several times, including “The Piano Turner,” which is hysterical, moving, and Southern Gothic as all get-out. In it a “strange lady,” the wealthy heiress of a Creole plantation family, summons Claude, the town’s piano tuner, to her mansion. “He knew that all she did was sit in a 150-year-old house and practice pop tunes on a moth-eaten George Steck upright.” As in many great Southern Gothic tales, there’s a fire involved in the denouement.