If I’m Going to Swelter, At Least Make it Gothic

When diving headfirst into a new subgenre and/or a new author, I always like to start with a collection. Short fiction is such a fantastic way to gauge an author’s range or a subgenre’s flavor. You get the opportunity to discover both in Eden Royce’s fantastic collection of southern gothic horror stores. As the book’s synopsis suggests, Royce’s specialty is lavishly Gothic settings that set the stage for the sinister and strange, and as someone who really appreciates a perfectly wrought setting I am certainly a fan. If you enjoy Royce’s collection too, be sure to pick up the second installment, Spook Lights II, or check out Royce’s middle grade Southern Gothic, Root Magic!

I’m just going to keep sobbing out my love for this book. Summer Sons doesn’t come out until September so I’ve still got two long months to talk it up before you can get your hands on it, and I will take every possible opportunity! It’s deliciously, gorgeously Gothic. It’s queer. It’s heartbreaking and healing at the same time. It’s about love and grief and all the other emotions that tangle us up as human beings and I am obsessed. I want to crawl inside this book and live. Andrew and Eddie have always been together, bound by a shared secret and a dark gift. Until Eddie gets accepted early to their graduate program, leaving Andrew to trail six months behind. When Eddie kills himself shortly before Andrew is supposed to join him, he carves a hole in Andrew’s life, dragging a trail of secrets in his wake. The circumstances of his death are murky, and the deeper Andrew digs the more he realizes how little he knew about Eddie’s new life without him. All around are strangers, and none stranger than the haunt that stalks his shadow, haunting Andrew with the possibility that Eddie’s death was not what it seemed.

We don’t have a lot of swamps up here. We have bogs. They aren’t as nice, though I imagine that they’re just as good for hiding bodies (or worse things). Whatever the reason, there is definitely a fixed connection between the quintessential Southern swamp and the Gothic. Particularly when it’s a swamp that makes people disappear (and not just when they’re dead). For instance, Sterling’s brother Phin, who disappears into the town swamp one morning following an argument. But Phin doesn’t just vanish into the swamp. He vanishes from the memories of the town altogether. Everyone but Sterling has forgotten he exists, or that in his place a mysterious girl called Lenora May clambered up out of the depths. So it’s up to Sterling to discover who Lenora May truly is, and how she can get her brother back.

I thought we’d end this list the way we started, with an incomparable collection of Southern Gothic horror short fiction. From hauntings, to monsters, to buried secrets and dark family histories, Ghost Summer is full of rich gothic settings and creeping horrors. Also, zombies! For a more familiar Southern Gothic experience you’ll want Gracetown, one of the four thematic sections of the collection, comprised of “The Lake”, “Summer”, and the titular novella “Ghost Summer”. But all 15 stories in the collection (well, fourteen and a novella) have something to keep horror readers well fed.