Atmospheric Southern Gothic Novels

When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author’s own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted — both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making.

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: Protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. The New York Times bestselling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation.

Now a Netflix film starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson
Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time blends the twisted intensity of Natural Born Killers with the haunting Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor. Set in rural Ohio and West Virginia from post–World War II to the 1960s, it follows a cast of bizarre, compelling characters in a taut, uncompromising narrative that proves Pollock a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

Deep in the swampy backwaters of Kingdom Come, its richest resident, Thomas, shoulders the dual responsibilities of caring for his conjoined triplet brothers, and the crumbling mill that is the only source of employment for the lost souls that call the county home. They fear Thomas and the power they think he holds — even the granny witches cut him a wide path — but depend on him all the same. Thomas, mired in obligation, has no reason to think things will ever change, but a carnival is coming to town, and with it, a long overdue reckoning.

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. And they’re sent to Wellwood House, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened. Every moment of their waking day is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. But when one girl finds an occult book about witchcraft, power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid … and it’s usually paid in blood.

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force — a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write, and the inspiration behind the hit TV series.

Former slave Sethe thought she left the past behind for good when she slipped past the border into the free state of Ohio, but the past doesn’t die so easily. Something terrible happened to Sethe’s baby — a nameless child that now lies under a tombstone marked by a single word: “Beloved”. What really happened is a secret, but the unexpected arrival of a teenaged girl named Beloved threatens to reveal all.

After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia. With nothing to her name, she scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market. It’s there that she connects with old high school flame Henry McCabe, now a reclusive fisherman whose infant son, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Everyone in town is sure Skyler is dead, but when Madi reads Henry’s palm, she’s haunted by strange and disturbing visions that suggest otherwise. As she follows the thread of these visions, Madi discovers a terrifying nightmare waiting at the center of the labyrinth — and it’s coming for everyone she holds dear.

A forensic psychiatrist’s investigation into an infamous Louisiana serial killer leads him down a dangerous path of obsession as he discovers they share the same cursed blood.

Karen Russell’s first novel combines Southern Gothic themes with a heavy dose of Magic Realism. Teenager Ava Bigtree always planned on joining the family business when she grew up: Swamplandia!, an alligator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. That was before her mother, the park’s headliner, got sick. Now Swamplandia! is in trouble, and everything is falling apart at the seams. With her brother now working at a rival park, her sister head over heels in love, and her father incapable of providing any help, it is up to Ava to head deep into the swamp to try to salvage what’s left of Swamplandia! and the Bigtree family.

Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt’s sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.

In an immersive Southern Gothic with echoes of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, a restauranteur lured by pandemic-era incentives moves her family to a seemingly idyllic small town in Georgia, only to discover a darkness lurking beneath the Southern hospitality and sun-dappled streets …

In her short lifetime, Flannery O’Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O’Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the “Christ-haunted” Protestant South.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, the novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of Benjy and his brothers, Quentin and Jason.