Now this is what I call Southern Gothic.And not the kind you find in Castleblayney, Monaghan.Haunted Dixie is what it promises on the cover and Haunted Dixie is exactly what it delivers.Fourteen stories, fouteen slices of American Gothic, whittled from the social and historical fabric of the different states and what a tattered ghostly flag it is that snaps in a supernatural breeze. The scent of magnolia dances in that breeze and what strange fruit is borne. From North Carolina to southern Carolina, from Florida to Tennessee , bend in the wind and allow yourself to be carried along.gifts from writers who may be familiar to you and others who may be obscure, perhaps not known at all.I am too thinly read to offer an estimate on presumed familiarity. The tone of the tales vary, uncomfortable back roads of narrative take us along moss strewn lost pathways to troubled times and troubled people. There is a casuality to an inverted social brutality that almost overwhelms proceedings. Prepare to have modern sensebilities rattled.
Some of the stories are steeped in a troubling fog of lived perceptions and words are used that have all but disapeared from use in this day and age. Yet their ghosts,the shades of their use, haunt some of the tales, way beyond the intended stories intentions to unsettle, to scare. The undoubted prejudices of distant erasw a part of southern American history and have the power to still frighten in a way supernatural beings or events simply cannot. The Southern soil these stories spring from is rich and fertile in storytelling terms. Lots of Goblin roots best left unpulled. Some of these stories have been waiting years to be rediscovered and read again. Yet there is a warning for the curious and a suggestion to leave things as you find them, warts n'all.
You surely will recognise some of the contributors in this well ordered anthology, the custodians of this Southern archive have done their job well and made choices which insure a shudder before bedtime; Orson Scoot Card, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Bloch and Ambrose Bierce among the more familiar names. With Elizabeth Spencer, Manly Wade wellman, Eugene K Jones and others perhaps being authors you may be less familiar with. But the old plantation has been dusted and well lit and all are welcome.There is enough in here to satisfy even the most jaded tastes. You have only to push open the creaking gate on the book cover to enter the splendour of a Souther Gothic Ball of a type they just do not have anymore. Allow yourself to drift dreaming into a world of haunted bayous, the crumbling elegance of old plantation mansions, tasting the heady wine of bygone days, through a skewed perspective of a lost era of American social history. Soak it up, breath in its musky aura, then move along, let it fade away, as ghosts do when real life reminds us of our imperatives.
Poor Haunted Dixie, we hardly knew ye.
