Southern Gothic

Playing Books & Bites Bingo? Try these suggestions for the prompt, a Southern Gothic.

According to Book Riot, southern gothic literature "usually features eccentric, flawed characters, sinister events, elements of the supernatural or fantastical, and themes relating to race, class, decay, violence, and isolation."

Updated September 12, 2024
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Bastard out of Carolina
Allison, Dorothy
Paper Book
Greenville County, South Carolina, a wild, lush place, is home to the Boatwright family-rough-hewn men who drink hard and shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who marry young and age all too quickly. At the heart of this astonishing novel is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone,...
Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story
Berendt, John
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A modern classic of true crime, set in a most beguiling Southern city--now in a 30th anniversary edition with a new afterword by the author The basis for the upcoming Broadway musical, coming in 2025! "Elegant and wicked . . . might be...
The gospel singer
Crews, Harry
Paper Book
"Harry Crews is magnificently twisted and brutally funny." - Carl Hiaasen A Penguin Classic Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie...
As I lay dying : the corrected text
Faulkner, William
Paper Book
A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. As I Lay Dying is one of the most...
Child of God
McCarthy, Cormac
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road * In this taut, chilling story,Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. ...
Outer dark
McCarthy, Cormac
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road * A novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child,...
Beloved
Morrison, Toni
Paper Book
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend...
Wise blood
O'Connor, Flannery
Paper Book
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street...
The color purple
Walker, Alice
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.
The optimist's daughter
Welty, Eudora
Paper Book
This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.
A streetcar named Desire
Williams, Tennessee
Paper Book
The story of Blanche DuBois and her last grasp at happiness, and of Stanley Kowalski, the one who destroyed her chance.

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