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 July 19, 2024
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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...
House of cotton
Brashears, Monica
Paper Book
FINALIST for the 2024 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * NPR BEST BOOK OF 2023 * An enchanting Black Southern gothic debut, perfect for readers of Mexican Gothic... "Fresh, haunting...In her roller-coaster ride of a gothic debut novel, Monica Brashears upends expectations at...
Ring shout : or, Hunting Ku Kluxes in the end times
Clark, P. Djèlí
Paper Book
Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark returns with Ring Shout, a dark fantasy historical novella that gives a supernatural twist to the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror "A fantastical, brutal and thrilling triumph of the imagination...Clark's combination of...
The boatman's daughter
Davidson, Andy
Audiobook
As I Lay Dying
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...
Crooked letter, crooked letter
Franklin, Tom.
Paper Book
"The classic trifecta of talent, heart, and a bone-deep sense of storytelling....A masterful performance, deftly rendered and deeply satisfying. For...
The keepers of the house
Grau, Shirley Ann.
Ebook
A "beautifully written" Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about prejudice and a distinguished family's secrets in the American South (The Atlantic Monthly). Seven generations of the Howland family have lived in the Alabama plantation home built by an ancestor who fought...
Starling house
Harrow, Alix E.
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK "This book has everything you could possibly want this fall...a cursed town, a haunted house, a vivid & eerie setting--plus, characters willing to risk everything." --Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club October '23 Pick)...
Soil
Kornegay, Jamie.
Audiobook
A darkly comic debut novel by an independent bookseller about an idealistic young farmer who moves his family to a Mississippi flood basin, suffers financial ruin-and becomes increasingly paranoid he's being framed for murder. It all began with a simple dream. An ambitious young environmental...
The cutting season : a novel
Locke, Attica.
Paper Book
From Attica Locke, a writer and producer of FOX's Empire: "The Cutting Season is a rare murder mystery with heft, a historical novel that thrills, a page-turner that makes you think. Attica Locke is a dazzling writer with a conscience."--Dolen Perkins-Valdez, New York Times ...
Child of God
McCarthy, Cormac
Audiobook
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.
When the reckoning comes : a novel
McQueen, LaTanya
Ebook
"LaTanya McQueen's When The Reckoning Comes is so deliciously uncomfortable there were moments where I had to put the book down, take a deep breath, and like Mira, its protagonist, urge myself to go further. This is a novel, like Octavia Butler's Kindred, that reminds its...
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...
The toll
Priest, Cherie
Paper Book
A 2020 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST HORROR NOVEL From Cherie Priest, the author of The Family Plot and Maplecroft, comes The Toll, a tense, dark, and scary treat for modern fans of the traditionally strange and macabre. ...
The Past Is Never: A Novel
Quay Tyson, Tiffany
CD
Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water-...
Sorrowland
Solomon, Rivers
Paper Book
A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2021 A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2021 The Stonewall Book Award winner of 2022 Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly<...
The little friend
Tartt, Donna.
Paper Book
The hugely anticipated new novel by the author ofThe Secret History—a best-seller nationwide and around the world, and one of the most astonishing debuts in recent times—The Little Friendis even more transfixing and resonant. In a small Mississippi town, Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes grows...
Brutes : a novel
Tate, Dizz
Paper Book
The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut--a coming-of-age story about the crucible of girlhood, from a writer of rare and startling talent We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones....
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.
Sing, unburied, sing : a novel
Ward, Jesmyn
Paper Book
*WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for FICTION *A TIME MAGAZINE BEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 OF 2017 *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize *Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal *Finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize...
A streetcar named Desire
Williams, Tennessee
Paper Book
It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared--57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous...
Winter's bone : a novel
Woodrell, Daniel.
Paper Book
When Ree Dollys father skips bail, the 16-year-old knows if he doesn't show up, her family will lose their home. Her goal had been to leave her life of poverty and join the Army, but first she must find her father, teach her little brothers to fend for themselves, and escape a downward spiral of...

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