Regional Gothic-Part Two

There is supposed to have been a Southern Gothic, but are there or have there been other regional Gothics? I don't know.

What got me started down this path is finding a novel originally published in 1968 and issued in a paperback edition in 1969. Entitled Expensive People, it's by Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938), and the edition that I have is the Fawcett Crest Books edition from 1970, with good cover art by an unknown artist. The whole package--illustration, design, typeface, graphics, everything--beats the heck out of what is being published now. My advice to readers and book lovers everywhere is to secure these books now before they are gone forever.

The cover of Expensive People is good, but it's also inaccurate. For one, the woman is not a blonde. In fact (or fiction), she has dark hair. For another, I don't picture the boy as being that together or that good-looking. He's actually pretty messed up. The thing that actually got me to read this novel, though, is the cover blurb. It reads:

A TALE OF GOTHIC HORROR

One of the problems with everything that is called Gothic is that there isn't any fixed or sure definition of "Gothic." I'm pretty sure, though, that Expensive People is not "a tale of Gothic horror." On the other hand, we have become inured to things that were horrifying in 1968.

Expensive People is a good and very well-written book. Put it into the category of stories about horrible mothers. It actually has something in common with crime and detective novels of mid-century. Like a detective story, it is centered around a kind of femme fatale, and it is one in which an assumed identity is exposed at the end. I won't give anything away.

Published in 1968, Expensive People looked far into the future, to now in fact when troubled boys and young men go around shooting people. The first sentence in the book is a confessional: "I was a child murderer." It's also shocking and sensationalistic. I think that was the intent. Despite the subject matter, Expensive People is a very funny book, and Ms. Oates writes well in the voice of a boy and young man.

I have one quotation from Ms. Oates' novel, an insight that will go far in its service to us as human beings . . .

The narrator, named Richard, is taking an entrance examination for a fancy Eastern school. (I capitalize "Eastern" because I want people to capitalize "Midwestern.") The proctor is named Farrel:

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

      Shall I be so blunt? The obvious beginning, yes. Nada [Richard's mother] brought me here, Dean Nash led me to it, but for some reason it was Farrel, that small and indeed insignificant man, who made me realize a dizzying truth about human beings: they don't care.

     No, they don't care, and it means something irreparable to know that. Not just to be told it casually, or to be shouted down by a playmate, "Drop dead, will you?" No, I mean knowing it, feeling it, tasting it with all of your insides. (p. 47)

No, they don't care, and we all have to realize that.

Expensive People is set in the East, and it has all of the trappings and features of an Eastern. (If there are Westerns, why not Easterns?) If it's a Gothic tale, then it must be an example of Eastern Gothic. And if there is an Eastern Gothic, then there must be other regional Gothics.

By the way, there is a yellow Cadillac early in the pages of Expensive People. It's yellow and it's a Cadillac for a reason.

Late last year I wrote about the Hudson River, and so I perked up this year when I read a phrase, "Hudson Gothic," in an online review of When All Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever (2025). The review is called "The Father Behind the Fiction," and it's by Rand Richards Cooper. Mr. Cooper's article is on the website ARC, dated April 16, 2026, and is found by clicking here. That phrase, "Hudson Gothic," refers to John Cheever's short story "The Hartleys," from 1949, in which there is "drunken despair and recrimination," "horror," and "the gruesome death" of a seven-year-old girl. I'll mention Susan Cheever outside of her title so that I can put her name in boldface.

I was encouraged to read that phrase, "Hudson Gothic." I guess I'm not the only one who senses the presence of other regional Gothics.

My third piece of reading is from this summer when I read Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956). I'm probably the only person in America who has read Peyton Place during the past thirty years. That's okay. It's good to know what all of the hubbub was about more than twice that long ago. Anyway, Peyton Place is not an especially good book. It drags for many, many chapters before picking up some speed towards the middle or end of Book One. The climactic part of Book Two actually has real power and is probably the most well-written part of the novel. There are three shocking events set against the backdrop of a drought summer and a raging forest fire: first, a crazy woman whose husband was forced to leave town after raping his stepdaughter hangs herself in her employer's house, in the closet of the teenaged girl who stands in for the authoress; next, an old woman dies in her rocking chair on the back porch of her house while watching through a gap in the hedge as her neighbors have sex in the yard, all of this witnessed by a boy in hiding only a few feet away (before making his escape, he strangles her leashed cat; the whole sequence reminds me of one in Light in August by William Faulkner [1932] in which a young Joe Christmas hides behind a screen and squeezes stolen toothpaste into his mouth as a man and a woman make love on the other side); and finally, at a carnival held while the wooded hills burn, another teenaged girl, a friend of the first, gets caught in the machinery of a carnival ride and has her arm ripped off, her friends trying to save her by grabbing the hand that is no longer attached to her body. That third event sounds sensationalistic, if not exploitative, but it is actually sober and very affecting for the sensitive reader. One day the sudden, wholly unexpected, and instantaneous catastrophe will befall all of us.

I thought that the girl had been chopped up and killed by the machinery. I was so relieved to find out in Book Three that she had survived and had even borne a baby. She was happy. If becoming attached to fictional characters is the measure of a good book, then I guess that says something about Peyton Place and Grace Metalious' writing. Anyway, set in a small town in New Hampshire, Peyton Place must be considered a Gothic novel, at least in part and if there is such a thing, and so it, too, must fall into the category of Eastern Gothic. (There is even a gloomy and deserted castle.) Maybe we should start building lists of Eastern and other regional Gothics, that is to say Gothics that are not in the genres of weird fiction, supernatural horror, fantasy, or the girl-meets-house type of Gothic romance.

This two-part series is the first of my Gothic topics for the next week or two. Stay tuned. Or not.

In this semi-quincentennial of America, I have another quotation from Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates. This one is for the writers of America, too, but don't be discouraged, O you hopeful and aspirational scribes:

. . . and one sign [. . .] caught my attention: a very American-looking man holding aloft a can of beer, with a puzzled expression, the caption being, Read a beer can tonight. Do you think I could have made up something so marvelous myself? Never, never! America outdoes all its writers, even its amateur writers! (pp. 75-76)

America outdoes all its writers. Knowing that--and I believe it's true--should give all of us great hope and cause to go on writing and recording what we can.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley