Today, I have as guest blogger D. Alexander Ward, whose latest book is Beneath Ash and Bone. He is
blogging about Gothic done Southern style for Supernatural Friday. Welcome him and enjoy his
post.
When
someone uses the term “Gothic,” we all know what they’re talking about, right?
It
conjures up a great many things that we have seen, watched, or read. Everything
from the arches and gargoyles perched on the ledges of the Cathedral of Notre
Dame in Paris to the barren and windswept moors of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and the ubiquitous,
Mary Shelley-esque manor house or castle, with candlelit windows, set against a
sky cracked by lightning.
Born
out of the Romanticism, these notions and images that represent the Gothic are
very true to their European origins.
But
like any American Southerner will tell you, “We don’t care how y’all do it
_________.”
Now,
usually we fill in that blank with the words “up North” but in this case I’m
going to say “across the pond.”
The
Gothic, as reimagined by Southern writers, has a long and complex history that
I won’t attempt to address here. I don’t want to get into the whys and the
wherefores of it, but let’s see if we can at least identify it and some of the
places it has shown up. And, finally, I’ll share a little bit about how I
infused my latest novel, Beneath Ash and
Bone with it.
It’s
impossible to address the Southern Gothic without talking about Flannery
O’Connor. Her fiction—and some of the best Southern Gothic fiction, if you ask
me—also often includes some of the finest examples of transgressive fiction,
where we are concerned not with the “betters” of society and their lives but
with the people that exist on the edges of polite society and who feel
encumbered or restrained by its tenets. Early Cormac McCarthy novels, such as Outer Dark and Child of God are fine and classical examples of the Southern
Gothic.
Quite
simply, where the Gothic tradition as exported from Europe tended to shine a
light on the lives and troubles of upper or upper-middle-class folks, the
Southern Gothic often veers off to the side and focuses, instead, on those the
European tradition would have only cast as bit characters. The help, the
indigent, the poor, the damaged. The grotesque.
Flannery
O’Conor once famously said (and it’s probably my favorite quote from her):
“Whenever
I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about
freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
So,
yeah. We like the freaks. And we find something important there in the lives of
those regular folks who walk around every day, not with their affairs in order,
but their lives and their psyches messy and broken. It resonates with us
because, deep down, we feel that we all have known that level of brokenness at
one time or another. Maybe we even know it still.
But
sometimes the freaks don’t take center stage.
Sometimes,
in keeping with the origins, the Southern Gothic does concern itself with the plantation owner and his family or the
politician—the upper-crust folks that were and are in power. Granted, it’s
usually only to bring them down a peg by exposing their misdeeds, their family
drama, or their most savage and basest tendencies. In my view, it’s done as a
means to say to the powerful that they are human, too, and they are not immune
from the scars and the demons that the rest of us poor souls must bear.
This
is what I’ve always loved about the Gothic done Southern style. It’s a great
equalizer. Fiction for the people by the
people, you might even say! Because, quite frankly, stories where the
powerful or the wealthy or the well-heeled are glorified and held aloft as
something to which we should aspire, are dreadfully boring.
If
you’re looking to dip your toes into Southern Gothic fiction for the first
time, I recommend anything by Flannery O’Connor, although my personal favorite
is Wiseblood. Along with that, I
would recommend A Feast of Snakes by
Harry Crews to get a look at just how weird and brutal it can really get.
Pinckney Benedict is another writer, alive and working today, that stands tall
as a purveyor of the Southern Gothic. And, lastly, an unequalled example that
tends more toward the horrific would be the late Tom Piccirilli’s novel, A Choir of Ill Children.
In my
own recent novel, Beneath Ash and Bone,
I blended—as I often seem to—different elements and aesthetics of the Southern
Gothic with the old European Gothic. I wanted a typical Gothic ghost story as
might be written by someone like Susan Hill… but with a bit of Southern flavor.
(Some great contemporary examples of this sort of thing that come to mind are
Rhodi Hawk’s A Twisted Ladder and the
film The Skeleton Key).
So,
setting it in Virginia in 1860, before the unrest of the Civil War, at an
influential local family’s estate, was my way of calling back to those great
works by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Bram Stoker, and the Bronte sisters. But
I didn’t want to get bogged down in the often flowery prose of those earlier
times, so I kept the writing more in my own style, which is contemporary and
(sometimes) poetic, but always with an edge. I also wanted to employ a very
distinctive aspect of Southern Gothic fiction, which is a sense of place. Not only to employ it but to give it more teeth
than is customary. I wanted Evermore and the winter blizzard that had cut it
off from contact with others to permeate every moment and to come across almost
as antagonistic characters themselves.
You’ll
have to be the judge about whether or not I succeeded in my efforts. In the
end, I hope I crafted a riveting and entertaining tale with both the Gothic and
the Southern Gothic as my inspiration.
As I
wrap up here, I’d like to thank the generous Pamela K. Kinney for the
opportunity to take over her blog for a day! Since you’re likely a reader of
her blog, you already know what a fabulous author and a wealth of knowledge Pamela
is on not only the subjects of writing and publishing and conventions but on
paranormal phenomena and legends of local ghost stories and haunted houses (the
kind of place I imagine my fictional Evermore has become in modern times). Keep
doing what you do, Pamela!
D.
Alexander Ward
---------------------------------------------------
Beneath Ash and Bone Blurb:
Selburn,
Virginia: A quiet backwater town nestled among the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the
days before the Civil War, Sam Lock keeps the peace as the town sheriff, like
his father before him.
That
peace is shattered during a raging winter storm when a boy goes missing at
Evermore, the sprawling estate of Horace Crownhill and his family. Racing
against time and the elements, Sam must mount a desperate search for the
child—but what he finds in the snow, and the dark halls of Evermore, are
madness ... and murder.
As Sam
searches for truth in a house poisoned by mysteries and haunted by ghosts, he
hopes to weather the storm, but the harrowing secrets he uncovers may prove too
terrible to bear. Will he escape with his sanity intact or will the dark
presence rumored to hold sway over Evermore claim him as another sacrifice?
--------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt
from Beneath Ash and Bone:
Later, when he woke for a moment in the dim light of that fading
candle, he made a vain attempt to crawl out of the dreams that enshrouded him
like a grave. Before that could be accomplished, though, a familiar hand
lighted on his shoulder and the sound of his father’s voice filled the room as
the man stood by his bedside. The moment
was so familiar that Sam knew it must be a dream.
“Wake up and stand fast, boyo,” his father uttered in his thick
brogue. “They’re comin’ around the back way and ye’d better have more than yer
knob in yer hand when they arrive.”
“Da?” Sam groaned, bleary in the near darkness.
It had to be a dream for there was no other reason his father
would be there, uttering those words again; words which echoed as small
tortures in Sam’s mind. Words that were a bitter reminder of how Sam had failed
him one hot summer night long ago and how the old man had paid for it with his
life.
Still, when he sat up in the guest house bed, he saw the old man’s
form lingering at the threshold of the small bedroom and he rose to follow him.
“Somethin’ goin’ on,” his father said, turning the corner, “and
ye’d better see to it.”
As Sam put his first step forward on the achingly cold floor, he
was suddenly aware that this was no dream. Something cold and wet mushed
between his bare toes and he looked down to see what it was.
Snow.
Messy, irregular heaps of the stuff led away from his bed, out the
door and around the corner. In the quiet of the guest house, he heard a
rhythmic, wooden thumping.
He checked his side expecting to find an empty holster but felt
the grip of his pistol there, drew it, and crept through the house to follow
the path that his father had taken. His wits now about him, it wasn’t that he
thought his Da was actually present in the room. It was just that his dream of
the dead man and the moment of his waking had intersected with something very
real.
Someone had left these tracks of snow on the floor and it wasn’t
him.
Sam turned the corner from the bedroom and looked into the
shadowed confines of the sitting room. He saw more lumps of snow staggered
along the floor and the door to the guest house ajar, banging open and shut
with the wind of the storm.
Then something else. The crunch of deep snow and a pressing against
the house.
He froze, waiting, scanning the room.
As his gaze fell upon the wide window that looked out onto the
wood, he saw a pale and deathly face looking in. The face of his father,
returned to taunt his son. He recoiled and brandished his pistol.
“But I have it this time, Da! See?”
Then the face was gone and something in its movement uprooted the
sheriff from his frozen fear. Indeed, it had been a spectral face that he had
glimpsed in the window, but it hadn’t been his father’s. And it had moved away quickly,
not with the slip of a spirit but the clumsy gait of a man.
Sam ran to the door and kicked it open, looking out onto the white
landscape of the grounds. Something wild was tramping through the snow in the
direction of the manor house, pale and gangly looking, its thin white hair
flying behind it.
“Stop there, you,” he hollered out and gave chase, but before he
could get far, the figure had disappeared into the shadows, incorporeal as the
night itself.
The sheriff stood there, his heart pumping. On the far side of the
main house, he saw an orange glow pulsating in the darkness. He barely sniffed
the air before he smelled it; burning.
Something beyond the house was burning.
Author
Bio:
D.Alexander Ward is an author and editor of horror and dark
fiction. As a volunteer and Affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association
he is an involved participant in the independent horror community.
In addition to Beneath Ash
and Bone, he is the author of Blood
Savages: A Blackguards Novel (Book 1), A
Feast of Buzzards, and After the Fire
& Other Tales.
As an editor, he co-edited the Lovecraftian horror anthologies, Shadows Over Main Street, Volumes 1 and
2 from Cutting Block Books and also, GUTTED:
Beautiful Horror Stories from Crystal Lake Publishing.
Along with his family and the haints in the woods, he lives near
the farm where he grew up in what used to be rural Virginia, where his love for
the people, passions and folklore of the South was nurtured. There, he spends
his nights penning tales of the dark, strange and fantastic.
He is
active on social media and you can find out more on his website: www.dalexward.com
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