Regional Gothic-Part One

In the spring of 1935, Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), a Southern author, spoke and wrote of what she called "Southern Gothic." She may very well have been the originator of that term. It seems to me to be a loose one. Sometimes I think every Southern author of the twentieth century was considered to be in that category, certainly William Faulkner (1897-1962), Carson McCullers (1917-1967), and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). In his vast study, Love and Death in the American Novel (Dell/Delta, revised edition, 1966), Leslie Fiedler wrote:

[. . . ] the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror (p. 26)

and:

It is the Gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers [. . .]. (p. 28)

In other words, in essence, American literature, or the mainstream of American literature, is Gothic according to Dr. Fiedler.

It used to be that American literature was, at least in part, regional. There were of course Southern authors, but there were also New England authors (Sarah Orne Jewett), Midwestern authors, also called authors of the Middle Border (Hamlin Garland), Chicago authors (James T. Farrell), Northwestern authors (Nard Jones), and many others. I'm sure there were Western regional authors who were not the authors of Westerns, too. Ivan Doig and Wallace Stegner come to mind, even if they were from a later era. August Derleth (1909-1971), a teller of weird tales, was a regional author of the upper Midwest, specifically his home state of Wisconsin. Regionalism was also in American art of the early to mid twentieth century.

I don't know how true that is today, I mean about regionalism in American literature. In this age in which a uniform gray sludge has come to overlay the land, I'm not sure there is such a thing as any regional author or regional novel. One exception might be the Eastern author, who writes the Eastern writer's novel, which is a novel written by an Eastern writer, about an Eastern writer, for a readership of Eastern writers, published by an Eastern publishing house, and reviewed by Eastern writers sitting in Eastern coffeehouses, drinking Eastern coffee, and nibbling on Eastern muffins or scones. These are sometimes good, for example, many of John Irving's novels. Very often they are dreary, for a person can read only so much about summer camps, prep schools, suburbs, beach houses, university campuses, and the agonies of the upper middle class.

So if the Gothic novel (or romance) is the pre-eminent form in American literature, and American literature was once regional, then does that mean that there were other categories of Gothics? There was supposedly a Southern Gothic. Were there also an Eastern Gothic, a Midwestern Gothic, and a Western Gothic at the very least? (Richard Brautigan, a Western author, actually wrote a novel called The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, published in 1974.) In weird fiction that was certainly true. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an exemplar of Northeastern or New England Gothic. Maybe Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was his counterpart in Texas or the West. If I knew more about Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) and his tales of the Rentharpian Hills, I could say that he wrote weird/Gothic tales of the Upper Midwest. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about him or them, even though I have read an account of his career, Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi by R. Dixon Smith (1985). That book, like so many books by fans, is basically a list or a catalog of facts and lacks any analysis or critical examination of the author's work. I was disappointed when I read it. Maybe I'll have to write myself about the late Mr. Jacobi and his oeuvre.

I'm from Indiana. Now here I am trying to think of an Indiana Gothic. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) lived and worked in Indiana before the Civil War, but he's not really closely associated with the Hoosier State, although some of his tales are set on the American frontier of his youth. Other well-known authors of Indiana--Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), Jessamyn West (1902-1984), Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924), Ross Lockridge, Jr. (1914-1948)--wrote in the mainstream. Indiana, after all, is a conservative place and its people tend towards conservatism and the mainstream. Maybe because of that, Indiana authors are often forgotten and their books set aside, unless they are made into movies, for example The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Friendly Persuasion (1956), The Girl of the Limberlost (1934, 1945), and Raintree County (1957). Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) was also from Indiana, but he began his writing career in a science fiction era, and so he doesn't appear to have been much of a Gothicist. Besides that, he turned into an Eastern writer and doesn't seem to have written much about his native state.

In Indiana, Gothics are more often, or exclusively, real-life phenomena, for example, the activities of the serial killer Belle Gunness (1880s-early 1900s), the murder of Howard Pitezel by H.H. Holmes (1894), the murder of Madge Oberholtzer by D.C. Stephenson (1925), the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens (1965), the Hollandsburg Massacre (1977), the Burger Chef Murders (1978), and the legend of the House of Blue Lights (1960s). The Pitezel and Oberholzter cases took place in Irvington where we grew up (there are still large, Gothic houses in that neighborhood), while the Sylvia Likens case happened a dozen or so blocks to the west. The Hollandsburg Massacre and the Burger Chef Murders happened when we were children. Along with the Speedway bombings and the Tony Kiritsis hostage-taking, they helped to make Indiana a scary place in the 1970s. And let's not forget that Charles Manson and Jim Jones also called Indiana home at one time or another.

And now I wonder whether Gothic horrors are simply the flipside of a staid, conservative, and traditional lifestyle and culture. What lies under the surface of the supposedly stable and respectable man, woman, or household?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley