The cotton fields, the heat, the weight of history … With the publication this month of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, MO Walsh explores the reasons for southern gothic’s global appeal
On one of the best days of my working life, I read a glowing review of my debut novel My Sunshine Away in Kirkus Reviews, a highly respected journal in America. The review ended with a proclamation that I have since gleefully memorised: “Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member.”
As a guy from Louisiana, as deep as the American south gets, this was mighty stuff for my ego. Still, I felt uncomfortable with that phrase “southern gothic”: had I written that kind of novel? The truth is, I hadn’t set out to. I had just tried to tell a story in the best way I knew how. And yet there I was, supposedly, at a cocktail party with some of the writers I most admired: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Barry Hannah, Zora Neale Hurston. I didn’t know what to make of it. And, now that my novel is being published in the UK, and with the literary world abuzz about Lee’s forthcoming Go Set a Watchman, I also have to wonder: why is southern gothic literature so popular across the globe?
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