One of the reasons I most look forward to the end of the year is because I often do rereads of my favorite novels during the holidays. Lord of the Rings is a must, and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles are a requisite. They rekindle my love of all things SFF, and they remind me why I do what I do. As a writer, my goal has been to transport and transfix like Rice and create new worlds beyond the bounds of the human imagination like Tolkien. Returning to some of my favorites is like slipping into the jeans you’ve had for years; the ones that fit you like a second skin and never fail to change your mood for the better.
But this year I may change things up a bit. In that spirit, here are five of my most beloved SFF books set in the American South and why I think we all need to challenge ourselves to some outside-the-box rereads this holiday season.
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
Of course, Rice’s vampires will always be my favorite, but the Mayfair witches are a close second. I devoured the first book in the series, The Witching Hour, when I was in high school, not long after I’d sold my soul to Anne Rice’s work. I remember reading it in a bubble bath and not noticing the water had turned cold until long after I was shivering. A dynasty of witches set against the backdrop of a lushly dangerous New Orleans? How can anyone say no? Dreamlike, dark, and delicious all at once, the Mayfair witches prove, yet again, why Rice rules supreme when it comes to the world of the Louisiana occult. It haunts you in just the right way, at the same time it beckons you to fall in deep. Plus, it’s a completed series. Any serious fantasy fan will tell you there is nothing better than falling in love with a finished story.
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
There had to be at least one vampire book among the five. The longer I am privileged to work as a writer, the more I admire the gifted ones who can marry the gothic with just the right dash of humor. Charlaine Harris is the queen of making a reader laugh out loud in the middle of a gruesome murder scene. Her Sookie Stackhouse series, immortalized by True Blood on HBO, is the perfect blend of cheeky, sexy, and scary. Dead Until Dark goes beyond the laughs to create a world and a space with one foot planted firmly in the familiar and the other in the darkly absurd. That world lingers with you long after you’ve turned the last page because, at its core, the book is relatable, and the characters worm their way into your heart. Sookie is much more than a sassy damsel in distress, and I still envy people who get to meet her for the first time.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The first time I finished this book, I remember sitting on my bed, slumped over, weeping and wondering how someone could wring their heart onto the page like this. Kindred is, first and foremost, a tale rife with feeling. One of deep sorrow, but also one of resilience. It contextualizes the pain and the generational trauma of our country’s greatest sin in a way that makes a reader incapable of looking away. Butler will always be the standard when it comes to eschewing what is expected and creating complex characters that buck typecasts in thoughtful, nuanced ways. Dana always lingers with me for days afterward, not because she is strong but because she is real to me. I feel with her, and that, in my opinion, is the only way for our society to truly understand the effects of slavery on our nation and on our souls.
Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins
Hawkins is another author who never fails to make me laugh, and Hex Hall is, in my opinion, always such a fun read. Set in a fictional boarding school for magical beings on a remote island in Georgia, the story of Sophie, a wayward witch who keeps making ridiculous mistakes when it comes to controlling her powers, is the perfect kind of holiday read. It’s fun and easy in that way any writer knows is damn hard to pull off. With a dash of romance and a lazy yet lovable heroine, this is one of my favorite one-sitting reads. Plus, it’s the beginning of a completed trilogy. If you’re looking for that perfect gift for your bookloving teen, give them Hex Hall. It never fails to cast the right spell.
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
This is a recent addition to the ranks of my favorite SFF set in the American South, but I was sold the moment I heard it was set at UNC Chapel Hill and involved a historically white magical society and a Black girl attempting to infiltrate its ranks to learn about its involvement in her mother’s death. As a Carolina grad, seeing my school through this lens of the occult was fascinating, as well as eye-opening when it came to the problematic elements in our history as the first public university to open its doors. Bree is an inspired, layered main character, and the book’s nod to Arthurian legend makes it one of the best urban fantasies I’ve read in a long time.
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The Ruined
Renée Ahdieh is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her spare time, she likes to dance salsa and collect shoes. She is passionate about all kinds of curry, rescue dogs, and college basketball. The first few years of her life were spent in a high-rise in South Korea; consequently, Renée enjoys having her head in the clouds. She and her family live in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of the Wrath and the Dawn series, the Flame in the Mist series, and The Beautiful quartet.
Back in the ’90s Tom Deitz had series based in Celtic Mythology but set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. I read most of them. It started with Windmaster’s Bane.
Earth Abides has a foray into the south during protagonist Ish’s assessment of post-pandemic America. Ish is quite condescending towards the community he finds there because they’re continuing on with the farming they’ve always done (including cotton, for which he sees no use). However, they’ve preserved agriculture, whereas Ish’s grand plan to preserve civilization eventually comes to nothing.
See also Fevre Dream (1982) by George R.R. Martin, set along the Mississippi River in 1857. A riverboat captain is approached by a mysterious, wealthy stranger who commissions the construction of a magnificent steamboat. As they sail the river, he notices that the stranger and his companions only come out of their cabins at night, and that after every stop there are reports of suspicious deaths.
A couple that come to mind are Daryl Gregory’s The Devil’s Advocate, a southern gothic bio-tech thriller, and The Rift by Walter Jon Williams, an epic, wide-scale disaster novel set along the Mississippi delta.
There’s probably a dramatic difference between books set in the US South by authors from the region and books etc by people from outside the region. Not that being from the south (if Texas counts) meant James Lee Burke’s books set there presented an especially favourable view of the South.
Sean Stewart has, as I recall, an interesting perspective due to his upbringing. If I recall correctly, he wintered in Alberta and summered in Texas. I did notice reading one of his novels that he understood winter cold. Not having ever been to Texas, I can’t speak to how accurate the Texas in his Galveston was.
Oops, that’s The Devil’s Alphabet, pardon the mistake.
The late David Drake’s Old Nathan collection is about an Appalachian cunning man in the early 19th century (probably around the 1830s, Nathan was a young man during the Revolutionary War and is an old man in the stories).
The Tom Deitz series mentioned in #1 was and is excellent – and it should be noted that along the way it adds a well-rendered element of Cherokee lore to the Celtic material…and makes the blending work. In this respect these books were well ahead of their time.
See also Manly Wade Wellman’s “John the Balladeer” stories and novels. Wellman also wrote several standalone supernatural stories set in the South, including the three “Sergeant Jaeger” novellas set during and after the Civil War.
For those of us from the generational South, any writer who isn’t is so dang obvious. In the grandmother’s funeral scenes from the first Sookie Stackhouse novel, I knew Charlaine Harris was one of us. Every nuance of etiquette was on point. Two current paranormal mystery/thriller series I enjoy are Angie Fox’s “Southern Ghost Hunter” and JL Bryan’s “Ellie Jordan” series. Both have a good Southern feel with solid research on Southern history.
Alex Bledsoe’s Tufa novels come to mind.
Could be called urban fantasy, if they weren’t rural.
I would also recommend Sean Stewart, for Mockingbird and Perfect Circle. I can’t speak to Galveston, but the Houston of Mockingbird seems familiar from the time I spent there.
I have read David Drake’s Old Nathan stories and Manley Wade Wellman’s tales of John the Balladeer; I heard about Tom Weitz’s Windmaster’s Bane when it first came out, but never read it – something I may need to correct.
For those who prefer audio as a medium, I have been listening to the podcast Old Gods of Appalachia, now in its fourth season, which combines Appalachian folklore and Lovecraftian horror, and whose creators indeed hail from the region; I became a regular listener after attending one of their live shows. For those listening to the podcast for the first time, I would not recommend starting with the current season, as it builds on the previous three; I would instead recommend starting at the beginning, with the understanding that the podcast evolves as it goes along.
A good portion of Howard Waldrop’s Them Bones, published in 1984, is set in Louisiana and if you can find a copy, get it because it’s an utter delight. I picked a used copy on a whim, knowing almost nothing about it prior, and it’s easily one of my favourite reads this year and moved into my top five overall.
No Michael Bishop, especially Catacomb Years…
VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy
Clark’s “Ring Shout”
Turtledove’s “Guns of the South”
Goonan’s “Mississippi Blues” and “Crescent City Rhapsody”
I bounced off Harris’s vampire series, but found her Midnight, Texas trilogy interesting. (Let’s not argue about whether Texas is South or Southwest; it has many attributes of both.)
Sarah Gailey’s When We Were Magic is unspecific about its location — it feels contemporary, and one can argue that the area is more tolerant of variations than the present-day South, but the winters are mild and “hanging moss” (which I read as Spanish moss, one of the tokens of the Deep South) shows up occasionally. I don’t remember place names from her “River of Teeth” stories, but they’re set in a post-Civil-War part of the US warm and wet enough for hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) to be happy in.
The Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove. Pretty grim.
For various reasons this kind of novels are very popular in Easter Europe.
A good recent entry in this category is The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings, which won him the 2023 Compton Crook Award from the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. The story is set in New Orleans, where Jennings currently resides.