Consider this a eulogy. A eulogy in advance, actually, to the southern gothic school of literature.

It’s still kicking, albeit slightly. A google search will turn back contemporary names like Jesmyn Ward and Ron Rash (neither of which I can vouch for, although reddit seems to be ecstatic about both). But given today’s eggshell social climate, I can’t help but feel as if the pulse of the southern gothic genre grows fainter by the day, fainter with each failed attempt to consider cultural context in literature.

Consider the following data: The American Library Association reports that in 2022 alone, 2,500 different books were objected to (i.e. submitted to be banned), compared to 1,858 in 2021 and just 566 in 2019. Check out the stats for yourself here.

Legendary southern gothic writer Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning The Bluest Eye was ranked among the top 10 most widely banned books of the 2023 school season thus far. To Kill a Mockingbird is taught in fewer and fewer classrooms each year. And in many educational districts, other southern gothic classics like Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying have long since been damned to the dustbins.

Maybe this is the beginning of the end. Maybe we’re living on the cusp of some new dark age of censorship, some cultural endgame devoid of southern gothic literature; or maybe I’m overthinking it all. Maybe I’m really just looking for a way to work in a conversation about my most recent literary obsession, the once and future queen of the southern gothic canon herself: Flannery O’Connor.

Below is a link to her Complete Stories collection. You can start with the “The Geranium,” but for the sake of continuity we recommend skipping ahead to “The Peeler, “ followed by “The Heart of the Park,” and then “Enoch and The Gorilla,” each of which is a chapter taken from her Flannery’s book Wise Blood. Side effects of reading may include: A sudden and strange fascination with resplendent birds. The urge to form a religious cult. Development of an unintelligible southern accent. I do declare! –Jackson Todd