There's a world of gothic that has little to do with vampires, mad scientists or blasted heaths. Instead, it's a world of dark family secrets, religious hysteria and warped sexuality amid the sweltering heat of Bible Belt America.
Southern gothic began as a uniquely American outgrowth of gothic literature, with authors such as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor adapting the dark heart of the gothic tradition. They stripped it of most of its supernatural trappings but retained its sense of the macabre and perverse to examine a postbellum south defined by poverty, confusion in the face of modernity and the physical and social after-effects of slavery. The grandeur of the south was now in decay, and – in place of the lonely mansions, creepy woodlands and timid heroines of Victorian gothic – southern gothic gave us dilapidated plantations, overgrown Spanish moss and fading southern belles who've witnessed the old world slip from their grasp.
