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The Gospel Singer

Harry Crews · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

A Good Man Is Hard to Find And Other Stories

Flannery O'Connor · 251 pages

The collection that established O’Connor’s reputation as one of the American masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as “The Displaced Person” and eight other stories.

Gothic FictionAmerican SouthDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Lottery and Other Stories

Shirley Jackson · 304 pages

A haunting and powerful collection of stories from one of America's finest writers, with a new Introduction by Patrick McGrath. Eerie, unforgettable, and by turns terrifying and hilarious, Shirley Jackson's collection of stories plunges us into a unique, brilliantly etched world where the uncanny lurks in the everyday and where nothing is quite what it seems. In "The Lottery," Jackson's most famo

Gothic FictionDark ComedySmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Hill William

Scott McClanahan · 222 pages

Hill William is a novel-in-stories chronicling the life of a young boy growing up in the mountains of today's West Virginia. Going no further than a mile from his home, the reader accompanies the narrator as he discovers the universe, as well as himself.

American SouthDark ComedySmall TownLiterary Fiction
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The Amulet

Michael McDowell · 301 pages

In the tiny town of Pine Cone, Alabama, Sarah Howell's handsome young husband Dean is injured by a faulty rifle, rendering him blind, mute, and motionless. Now Sarah is forced to live with her vindictive and controlling mother-in-law Jo, who blames the entire town for what became of her boy. When a spree of gruesome fatal accidents spread around Pine Cone, Sarah suspects the culprit is the strange

American SouthGothic FictionDark ComedySmall Town
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Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver · 560 pages

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in hi

American SouthDark ComedySmall TownLiterary Fiction
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The Dressmaker

Rosalie Ham · 296 pages

Exotic Tilly, a talented and beautiful misfit, returns from Europe to the small Victorian town of Dungatar to nurse her mad old mother. Her reappearance after twnety years is met with suspicion and malice from the eccentric locals until they discover her startling dressmaking skills.

Gothic FictionDark ComedyLiterary FictionDark
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Those Across the River

Christopher Buehlman · 352 pages

Moving to rural Georgia, a failed academic plans to write a history of his family's old plantation and the horrors that occurred there but instead discovers a sense of unspoken dread among the townspeople and a long-standing debt of blood.

Gothic FictionAmerican SouthSmall TownDark
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Smonk

Tom Franklin · 272 pages

It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducin

American SouthDark ComedySmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Child of God

Cormac McCarthy · 197 pages

Falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard is released from jail, and a trip to the dry-goods store, an errand to the blacksmith, and other incidents are transformed into scenes of the comic and the grotesque.

Gothic FictionAmerican SouthLiterary FictionDark
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The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks · 184 pages

Gothic FictionDark ComedyLiterary FictionDark
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A Choir of Ill Children

Tom Piccirilli · 240 pages

This lyrical tale of evil, loss, and redemption is a stunning addition to the Southern gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews.A Choir of Ill Children is the startling story of Kingdom Come, a decaying, swamp backwater that draws the lost, ill-fated, and damned. Since his mother's disappearance and his father's suicide, Thomas has cared for his three brothers--conjoined triplets wit

American SouthGothic FictionSmall TownDark
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A Visitation of Spirits

Randall Kenan · 257 pages

From Publishers Weekly As its title suggests, a powerful strain of mysticism runs through this story of personal awakening in a black North Carolina family, but first-time novelist Kenan has a rare gift for naturalism as well, capturing the texture of farm life with vivid detail. The novel follows Horace Cross, a brilliant, tormented teenager who is his family's greatest hope, through a night whe

American SouthLiterary FictionSmall TownDark
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Wolf Whistle

Lewis Nordan · 290 pages

Based on the author's childhood memories of the murder of Emmett Till, the story of a Mississippi white-trash girl who teaches fourth grade at the Arrow Catcher Elementary School is the story of righteous racism and violence and the 1950s American Southern ethic at work.

American SouthDark ComedyLiterary FictionDark
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Victorian Psycho

Virginia Feito · 206 pages

Gothic FictionDark ComedyLiterary FictionDark
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The Neon Bible

John Kennedy Toole · 162 pages

The first novel by the Pulizer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy Of Dunces. David is a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. From his porch, David can see the whole valley, including the neon Bible that lights up the sky, emblem of the God-fearing folk who snub his family because Poppa can't afford the church dues.

American SouthLiterary FictionSmall TownDark
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Twilight

William Gay · 240 pages

Gothic FictionAmerican SouthLiterary FictionDark
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And the Ass Saw the Angel

Nick Cave · 316 pages

Outcast, mute, a lone twin cut from a drunk mother in a shack full of junk, Euchrid Eucrow of Ukulore inhabits a nightmarish Southern valley of preachers and prophets, incest and ignorance. When the God-fearing folk of the town declare a foundling child to be chosen by the Almighty, Euchrid is disturbed. He sees her very differently, and his conviction, and increasing isolation and insanity, may h

Gothic FictionAmerican SouthLiterary FictionDark
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American SouthGothic FictionLiterary FictionDark
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The Beguiled

Thomas Cullinan · 408 pages

"The basis for the major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning, and directed by Sofia Coppola "[A] mad gothic tale. The reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies." --Stephen King, in Danse Macabre Wounded and near death, a young Union Army corporal is found in the woods of Virginia during the height of

Gothic FictionAmerican SouthDarkLiterary Fiction
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

American SouthLiterary FictionSmall TownDark
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The Night of the Hunter

Davis Grubb · 271 pages

Young John Harper guards his father's secret although many people try to find out the truth.

Gothic FictionAmerican SouthDarkLiterary Fiction
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Mongrels

Stephen Graham Jones · 320 pages

**A spellbinding and darkly humorous coming-of-age story about an unusual boy whose family lives on the fringes of society and struggles to survive in a hostile world that shuns and fears them.** He was born an outsider, like the rest of his family. Poor yet resilient, he lives in the shadows with his Aunt Libby and Uncle Darren, folk who stubbornly make their way in a society that does not und

Dark ComedyAmerican SouthLiterary FictionDark

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