Southern Gothics

I love southern Gothics like I love air and if I could I would spend my entire life wasted on them. I found this cool piece the other day describing the genre and I'd like to share! My love for them is initially why I liked SPN in the first place because that really was the best description for it.

"The decaying ruins of the old American South are crawling with ghosts. Spirits stilted in time, haunting overgrown forests and hiding in forgotten places so overgrown with the unkillable greenery that they bear no resemblance to what they once were. It is just an ocean of trees, suffocated by the Japanese invasion of creeping vines. Time has stopped, and they have been left behind. Even the trunks of the strongest oak trees bend in defeat of the southern sun that would melt any other setting built of less resolve. Old plantation homes turn to dust that dances in the wind, carried off to parts unknown and leaving behind nothing but the legend once held within their walls. The creek of a rocking chair on an old wooden porch and footsteps crunching against gravel roads create a soundtrack to this journey.

Crumbling towns too small to grace the pages of any map becomes the stage for a cast of colorful characters who stand at the brink of a dying culture and look to the rest of the world with an unwavering pride and determination that can only be found in the Deep South. You won’t find a celebration of the southern belle on the arm of her handsome beau. Broken souls and broken bodies walk the desolate streets in rags passed down from better days. Our hero is an outsider, hindered by some grotesque abnormality of mind or body. Their world is a lonely one, plagued with a soul crushing sense of abandonment. They do not belong in this world because everything here fights to snatch away the innocence that society places such a high value on. But such a fleeting idea will turn to ash in their hands and slip right through their twisted little fingers.

Their world is a violent one. Tensions ride high on the backs of racism and classism and sometimes it is the wild and untamed children who must rise in revolt of the ideas of the bygone age of their ancestors. They balance on the edge of a knife, forced to balance naivety against desperation. Our heroes will soon learn what they are capable of in the face poverty and alienation."

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