Selected Horror Essays
Upcoming: Snakes in the Kudzu. The H-Word, Nightmare Magazine
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Your Favorite Author's Favorite Author: Elizabeth Broadbent on William Faulkner
Shortwave Magazine
The Southerner might hate the face of his father, but he never forgets it ... I’m forced to figure my own literary inheritance like an adult groping through detritus of a ruined childhood. To discard those forebears is to refuse what makes me myself.
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How do you love your racist father?
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So Much Blood in This Earth: Southern Gothic and Generational Trauma
NightTide Magazine
Southern history is a blood-soaked horror of war and enslavement, death and despair. That horror leaked into our land. It remains, sure as soil and still inscribed upon it: in Richmond’s picturesque cobblestones, laid by the enslaved; and in Mississippi’s unfurling cotton fields, watered by sweat and grief. It lingers in postcard-pretty vistas of battlefield parks, their staid graves lined up like small, white teeth; in arrowheads plowed from fields or grubbed from muddy riverbanks. It glares from bronze monuments of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and rises defiant in Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War. Amid our moss-draped trees and white-columned houses, horror accuses us from bombed churches, from rope-scarred oaks, from sacred rivers dammed to build world-swallowing bombs. We Southerners can no more deny history than we can defy gravity.
(Big thank you to editor Mo Moshaty for her hard work and stellar suggestions!)
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Five Southern Gothic Books about Generational Trauma You Probably Haven't Read
Reactor
Social obligation and an ex-boyfriend once landed me at a lineage society dinner in Charleston, South Carolina. The exact association doesn’t matter; pick one, and you’re probably right. Beneath stern portraits of Confederate generals with epic facial hair, white people ate rubbery chicken and celebrated the fictions they willed into history. Anyone with money and connections enough to join that particular society owed both to the blood and sweat of enslaved people. No one acknowledged it. And as I scanned the dining room of that vaunted Charleston club, I realized that every member of the waitstaff was Black. I kept my mouth shut as a server took my plate. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I hope y’all spit in our food. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a hundred and thirty-years after the War ended, that roomful of white people continued to enact the crimes of their ancestors. It’s no wonder Southern literature lends itself to narratives about generational trauma.
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The Past is Never Dead: Southern Gothic and Child Abuse
NightTide Magazine
In the South, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past." It remains inscribed on our landscape. When my husband and I were first together, we would tell people, “We live in the first house up from the nearest corner where Nancy got hit by that drunk driver.” We meant Nancy Thurmond, Strom’s daughter, who was struck while crossing the street and died in the arms of the Democratic Lieutenant Governor. That accident had happened more than twenty years before Chris and I moved in.
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Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic Horror
Ginger Nuts of Horror
The paradigm of womanhood offers two options. We can be virtuous daughters, wives, and mothers, or we can be whores. In few places is that contradiction as stark as the American South. It derives, in part, through our unironic, twin literary obsessions with Alexander Dumas 1 and Walter Scott—our forebears made the crucial mistake of taking The Three Musketeers and Waverley as stellar life advice, and we haven’t been quite right since.​
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Night Country: A Dark, Powerful Feminine Mirror
Ginger Nuts of Horror
While the stick-labyrinth Carcosa in True Detective’s first season carries a hint of perverse womb, one that harbors death rather than life, the ice caves in Night Country might as well be a frozen birth canal. They’re the true essence of Night Country, that unknowable realm that swallows men whole. It’s here that the Tsalaal scientists exact their enviro-sexual crimes; it’s here that the cradle of life lies waiting in the guise of frozen microorganisms.
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Recent Book Reviews:
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The Night Ship, Alex Woodroe, Cemetery Dance
ITCH! , Gemma Amor, Cemetery Dance​
Psychopomp and Circumstance, Eden Royce, NightTide Magazine​
The Pulse Remains, Rob Grimoire, Cemetery Dance ​​​​
Moonflow, Bitter Karella, Cemetery Dance​​
Fever Dreams of a Parasite, Pedro Iniguez, Cemetery Dance​​