Nightmare Magazine Issue 32 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Dark Fantasy, Short Stories
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2015-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen-and-a-half novels and six collections. Nearly half of that’s probably horror. Stephen’s forty-three, teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR-Palm Desert, and lives in Boulder, Colorado.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

NONFICTION

The H Word: The Dirty South

Lynda E. Rucker

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

— Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

“. . . while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

— Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”

The South is haunted. Haunted by Christ; haunted by ghosts; haunted by its sins, real and imagined ones. My own Southern childhood was profoundly haunted. I dreamed of witches and devils in the woods surrounding my house and imagined ghosts lurking on the ceiling outside my bedroom where the wood fire roared in the living room of the cabin I grew up in. Summers, when school was out, I spent most nights up reading until two or three in the morning, only partly because it was too hot to sleep and because I had a hard time putting down my books. The other reason was that I was often too frightened by what I was reading to turn out the light and give in to darkness and the troubled landscape of dreams.

For a long time, though, there was little connection between the genre horror I read and the landscape and culture in which I was growing up. The horror in my books all happened in other places — in New England, or the British Isles, or anywhere but where I was. The Southern gothic, the decadence, the grotesqueries that the likes of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and Harry Crews and many other regional writers chronicled so effectively were such a part of the warp and weft of my existence that I didn’t recognize them as such until years later. Not every writer has to leave home in order to truly understand where they came from, but I did.

But certainly there was a sense of horror and wonder all about me, all the time. The sprawling rural Georgia county where I grew up was home to a vast network of dirt roads leading to broken-down houses, abandoned one-room schoolhouses, and cemeteries, and I explored them all. In rambles through my beloved woods, I sensed something both harrowing and holy: later, the work of writers like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood would speak to that sense of numinous horror that nature can inspire. There were local tales of ghosts, like the long-dead preacher and ferryman who, it was said, would take you with him if you turned up on the shore near his gravesite at midnight (but I did, once, at New Year’s, and he failed to keep the appointment).

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