Southern Gothic *clap clap clap clap clap*
You're supposed to read this as a "Let's Go Sports Team" type chant or it's not going to work ok
I want to talk about Raleigh, North Carolina, for a minute, if you’d oblige me. (I’m using my most Foghorn Leghorn-ass vocabulary here to fit the theme, hence my use of the word “oblige.” Maybe I will even Do Declare something later. Watch this space.) Raleigh’s oldest cemetery is the City Cemetery, just east of downtown, founded in 1798. The black iron fence that borders it used to wind around the Capitol building to protect its grounds from grazing livestock.
Half a mile north is Oakwood Cemetery, home of the Ratcliffe Angel, a statue that spent years at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Wilmington after the ship carrying it from Italy sank. The monument, commissioned by a widower in the image of his wife, now guards her grave, reportedly craning its neck to watch passersby at night.
On the far side of downtown, near NC State’s campus, is the historic Dorothea Dix Hospital (est. 1856), the state’s first psychiatric institution, now closed. 30,000 Union soldiers once camped out on its grounds during the end of the Civil War. A small cemetery full of the marked and unmarked graves of patients (including one of the hospital’s first Black patients, a Union service member) overlooks a sunflower patch that now draws thousands every summer for Instagram fodder. Some of Dix is a park now, some of it houses the NC Department of Health and Human services, and a bunch more still looks like this:
This land also includes the site where an orphanage burned down in 1905, and anyone walking through the fields where its cornerstone still lies is warned to stay vigilant for the thick scent of smoke and the feeling of small, grasping hands. It’s called Crybaby Lane.
All over downtown Raleigh there’s weird swollen trees with faces in them and peg-legged ghosts and Victorian mansions and bricks etched with the names of the 19th-century prisoners who made them.
If you were from there you’d probably develop a soft spot for Southern Gothic, too, is all I’m saying.
I waited around six months for this one to work its way through the library holds queue to me and I was right to be impatient the entire time about it. The Bog Wife was every bit as mysterious and weird and visceral and gross as I had expected.
A family with hazy but proud roots in the Scottish Highlands molders away in rural Appalachia (“The Highlands and Appalachians are both part of the same mountain range,” the patriarch affirms to his children repeatedly) in a mansion that’s collapsing around them. There’s cult-like adherence to family tradition, a devotion to the bog they live on and their supposed pact with it, and suffocating insulation from the outside world. With the impending death of the patriarch and the return of a prodigal sister, more and more belief and lore keeps withering under scrutiny, but I still can’t believe where this one ended up.
This has maybe fewer of the usual Southern Gothic criteria, but it’s 1) good and 2) has ghosts, so Junie is in this mix for sure. Based on the author’s own ancestor who escaped slavery, the book follows a sixteen-year-old girl enslaved on an Alabama plantation who’s given a prerogative from the ghost of her recently dead sister: get out. Eckstine’s ghost is something special, glowing brightly and walking barefoot through the swamp, becoming less human with every full moon that passes without her demands being met. The image of generations of spirits with unfinished business that Eckstine paints, running and laughing and playing and crying among the Spanish moss and fireflies beyond estate borders, is a rich addition to the genre.
Ashley Winstead was so correct when she decided that the scariest thing you could add to a Southern Gothic story was the Evangelical Panopticon. Midnight is the Darkest Hour is brimming with the stifling, humid atmosphere that you get in a small town with twitched-aside curtains and whispered gossip and Getting Mad at the Concept of Harry Potter. A man’s skull washing up in a swamp means the pastor’s daughter and her delinquent best friend have tracks to cover and mysteries to solve and not a lot of time to do either.
There are like a thousand details in MITGOGAE that I will never stop thinking about. It seems like journalist John Berendt was incapable of stepping a single foot outside his rental in Savannah without being accosted by some kind of weirdo.
There’s a guy named Luther who used to work for an exterminator and has a jar of poison that everyone knows about and on bad days he talks about dumping it into the water supply so everyone in the town keeps tabs on whether it seems like he enjoyed his breakfast at the diner or not, just in case.
More or less every page of the book is like this, jam-packed with the kind of weirdness that defies imagination, and this is before you even get to the central plot of the book: a genteel antiques dealer being tried for the murder of his part-time assistant four different times because of repeated mistrials and a hung jury, as details change and witnesses climb out of and recede back into the woodwork. Oh and also the antiques dealer has a root doctor on retainer to continually be putting curses on the District Attorney and various members of the jury. Okay I seriously can’t keep telling you weird things about this book or we’ll be here all day.