Guest Post | "Country Weird" by Steve Rasnic Tem

The gothic tends to thrive in less populated regions of the world, the lands where there are more trees, more stones, than people, environments which nourish both self-reflection and loneliness. And yet it also requires, I think, some sense of a history, evidence that human beings once walked there, that they studied and dreamed, and raised families who would someday mourn their departure, there, right where you’re standing, on the grave of another person’s life.

I first encountered the English ghost story in high school, thanks to some scattered volumes in my great grandfather’s library. The house containing that library, built on a distant southwest Virginia mountain ridge before America’s Civil War, was one of the better examples of ornate gingerbread in the region. My grandfather grew up there. There was a portrait of his sister in the parlor—she’d died a child in the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. I still own one of her schoolbooks.

I spent a number of summers in that house which murmured and talked though many a hot and humid night, hiding under the covers with a book and a flashlight. There were no streetlights, and the nearest house was some distance away. I never knew a darker place. It was in this setting where I first read those tales of English churchyards and ancient architecture, crumbling ruins and half-glimpsed presences in the curtains, under the sheets, in the shadows behind a door. Helpless victims were in abundance, as were sinister presences.

It all seemed terribly familiar, somehow. The settings weren’t that different from the rotting old houses and abandoned buildings (rarely torn down) nestled within the overgrown landscape of the American South. The characters were different—I knew very few scholars, or priests. But there was a similar sense of the impositions of history, of unforgivable racial sins committed in a distant past, and an obsessive interest in spiritual matters, resulting both from the anguish of loss and the sincere hope that there might be a better and richer life beyond. Southern religion, as I experienced it, was a scary thing. It encouraged desperate and eccentric (sometimes grotesque) behavior, and at times unhealthy relationships.

Readings in Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers bolstered this comparison, and my growing sense of the Southern Gothic. I also became aware that the particular sub-region of the South where I lived, Appalachia, had its own flavor of the gothic. It’s a land of hollows and high mountain walls, a limestone karst geology riddled with caves and sinkholes. The residents were even more isolated than in the rest of the South, more eccentric, more suspicious of outsiders.

My two most recent books stem from that time of early discovery. My latest story collection, Here With the Shadows (Swan River Press), is my attempt to emulate those early 20th century English ghost stories I loved so much. And Blood Kin (Solaris Books), alternating between Depression-era Appalachia and the same region in the present day, is full-on Southern Gothic ramping up into horror.

Book Review | Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem

Michael Gibson has returned to the quiet Appalachian home of his forebears to take care of his grandmother. Sadie is old and sickly but she has an important story to tell about growing up poor and Melungeon (a mixed race group of mysterious origin) while bedeviled by a snake-handling uncle and empathic powers she but barely understands. 

In a field not far from the family home, however, lies an iron-bound crate within a small shack buried four feet deep under Kudzu vine. Michael somehow understands that hidden inside that crate is potentially his own death, his grandmother's death, and perhaps the deaths of everyone in the valley if he does not come to understand Sadie's story well enough.

***

Folks are rarely as forthright in life as they are in literature.

Communicating the truth of the human condition would make for some messy stories, so even the most deftly developed characters are at best partial pictures of the people they’d really be. After all, we wear different faces each day, don’t we? We wear one at work, another at home; one in the company of our mothers, another alongside our lovers.

During your life you play many parts—a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a hero, a villain. You enter people’s lives and then you exit them. You say your lines—you inspire some people, and maybe some people hate you. And then, well, you leave the stage. (p.233)

Whether you receive a round of applause when you do, or boos, is up to you.

Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem is a book about the conflicting legacies we leave which deals with death and depression and disability whilst trading in tension and frequently intolerable terror to excellent effect.

Our man Michael is almost a monster at the offing. On the back of a bad breakup he’s come back to the house in the South where he was born and raised; ostensibly to look after his ailing grandparent, but in truth he’s considering killing her—or at least letting her die. He decides against it, eventually, before settling in to suffer through some more of old Sadie’s story.

See, for some reason she’s determined to tell him about her hardships in this here hollow. About the preacher whose hellish services she was pressganged into attending as a girl, and the ungodly horrors that followed:

They’d had the most gruesome murder anybody had ever heard of and the murderer in the local jail and the deputy scared to death of angry folks taking his prisoner and her daddy almost shot the most popular moonshiner in the county and there were two big families now that didn’t know how to talk to each other and of course there was the preacher going a little crazier each day. Who walked around with a snake under his shirt curled around his chest and belly. (p.217)