Review 76: Southern Gothic Shorts

Southern Gothic Shorts
New Short Stories from the Winners
of the Inaugural Southern Gothic
Shorts Writing Competition
collected by Phillip J. Morledge
PJM Publishing
Copyright: © 2008
$11.21 Paperback
130 Pages
ISBN: 9780955976551

I remember coming across a blog post about this contest last year, and I thought about submitting something.  But at the time, the deadline was fast approaching and I didn’t have a short story which I would describe as “Southern Gothic.”  What is Southern Gothic you might ask?  The contest description pointed interested parties to the Wikipedia definition which states the following:

Southern Gothic is a subgenre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.

That being said, the first place winner, Kerry Donoghue, definitely deserves the award for their short story called “The Pearl.”  I admit it.  At first I rolled my eyes at the title alone because the first thing that came to mind was the Steinbeck book I was forced to read in high school.  Just goes to show you can’t judge a story by the title because Donoghue is far from Steinbeck – if not better.

Meet Harlan and Jezebel (it doesn’t get any more Southern than that, does it?).  They are brother and sister.  Harlan, a drunk with a bad eye,  works on washing machines.  Jezebel cooks dinner, practices diving in the Mississippi river and enjoys watching Wheel of Fortune.  Yep, the two of them are beaming with stereotypical deep south traits, but Donoghue does not poke fun at them.  He embraces them and gives them a voice with dialogue I’ve definitely  heard before back home in my Mama’s kitchen.  The narrative comes alive with odd imagery that you don’t know if you should admire for being so vivid and real, or laugh at for being so absurd:

Harlan stretched his long legs and felt the perspiration river along the backs of his thighes, through the tangles of leg hair, into the dark valleys of his jean shorts. It was only noon and the heat was just getting started. After another sip, Harlan ate his sandwich and from the weedy riverbanks, watched his sister with his good eye.

Harlan is more interested in his next bottle of gin while his sister wants to travel to Australia to go pearl diving.  What she doesn’t know is that Harlan has been saving money from his various fix-it jobs to pay for her trip but when a bar brawl lands Harlan in jail, his savings has to be used for bail.

The 2nd place winner is “The Long Way Home” by Drew McCoy and it reads like a long stretch of Faulkner inspired rambling, only Faulkner did it better.  It’s the story of a son on the way to pick up his father who is being released from prison. According to the author’s website, this short story was also written as a play, and it definitely reads like it.  There is no use of quotations to set off any of the dialogue.  I’m not sure if it was meant to be like that or if it was a typo.  It takes up 26 pages of the total 130 in the book, which was about 25 too many for me.

“The Accident” by Connor De Bruler takes 3rd place for a haunting story that reflects the likes of Flannery O’Connor.  It’s only six pages long and follows a mysterious driver who believes he’s hit a dog on the road.  He puts the dog in his truck and continues driving into town to seek medical attention for his passenger.  The story echoes a camp fire tale made of urban legends, but lets the reader down a bit with a single typo that sticks out like a sore thumb right in the last lines.

Seven runner-up stories follow, all of various southern characters and plotlines, any of which deserved at least 2nd place more.  “The Last Confession” by Patrick Brian Miller follows a priest whose been assigned to take over a small country church in a tumble weed town.  His first visitor to the confessional is one that he, and the reader, probably didn’t expect.  “Cut Through Road” by Chris Deal is the first person narrative of a mentally challenged character who gets some unsuspected help from a crook and the opportunity to pay him back.  It reminded me of Alice Walker or even Faulkner’s Benjy from The Sound and the Fury.  The story itself is quite simple, but the voice of its single character is so sad and honest that it makes this story quite memorable:

I was stopped by a couple of white men in a knocked up truck. they pulled up beside me and got out, a taller boy with bright red hair and a shorter, blond one. The blond one didn’t have no shirt on and had a drawing on his arm of a naked lady. The tall boy had a knife and told me to give him my money.

I said i needed it for a biscuit. I walked up to Pucket’s about once a day except for Sundays for a jelly biscuit and a Coke but that tall boy just told me to give him my money.

They came close and the blond one took my hand in his and twisted it up beyond my back and it hurt. The tall boy put that knife to my belly and said he weren’t going to ask again.

I have to comment on Mr. Morledge’s format of the book – the good and the bad.  The price of the book on Lulu does not match the listing on Amazon.  I also thought the book’s cover was a tad boring and didn’t really have any “Southern flare” to it. But for a self-published book that is being advertised under his publishing company, the book’s format is quite impressive.  Everything from his logo on the title page to the font of the headers gives the book a very professional feel.  If only the book had been edited a bit more closely, I’m sure it would be a collection that even someone like Tennessee Williams would enjoy. Congrats to all the winners!  Overall, it is an anthology to be quite proud of.