The U.S. South has an enduring association with horror. The site of Native American genocide, brutal plantation slavery, and thousands of gruesome lynchings, the region evokes images of real-life violence, which often manifest in imaginary iterations in southern literature and culture. Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners, for example, invokes many tropes of the southern gothic literary tradition. Meanwhile, a new handbook of the southern gothic is in development by Oxford University Press, which re-examines the conventions of the genre and its continual appeal for writers and readers. The papers on this panel will explore the boundaries of monstrosity in southern literature by examining texts that exist in a liminal zone between conventional narrative and horror to interrogate when the banal becomes the monstrous.

The contributors on this panel are all engaged in discourses on the horror genre. This panel allows them to expand their research into new areas to consider texts on the boundaries of monstrous genres. Because this panel features four papers, each presenter will be limited to 13 minutes speaking time to allow for introductions and discussion of the ideas shared in the papers.

Katharine A. Burnett’s “Mediating Monstrosity: Antebellum Southern Horror” will examine the depiction of monsters in antebellum southern literature as manifestations of present or portended violence. Through an examination of two texts by William Gilmore Simms–Martin Faber: The Story of a Criminal (1833) and “Grayling; Or, Murder Will Out” (1842)–she will trace how literary representation worked to reveal the monstrosity of the US South in the nineteenth century. Both texts manifest a bifurcated narrative approach. They are ghost stories, and they crime and early detective stories, that use a realist structure. They take an equally bifurcated approach to the monstrosity of the antebellum US South because they reveal monstrous acts through the realism of a purported true crime narrative while using supernatural figures to negotiate that monstrosity to the ends of those who benefit from it.

Melanie A. Marotta’s “Black Women’s Southern Gothic: The Conjure Woman in Eden Royce and Jasmine Holmes” examines the healing that the conjurer figure provides in the African American horror genre. She will discuss Eden Royce’s Psychopomp and Circumstance, set of Reconstruction-era Charleston, and Jasmine Holmes’ Our Sister’s Keeper, set in the Black incorporated town East Cobb, Mississippi. Both writers engage with the attempted corruption of the black female body through outside violating forces that continue to perpetuate violence against Black women. She argues that Royce and Holmes (re)claim the rightful positionality for Black women in the American gothic horror genre, one that has been denied them in the past. By writing themselves into existence through the medium of gothic horror, Royce’s Phee and Holmes’ Marah become the twenty-first century conjure woman, revealing gothic horror’s capacity to heal.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt’s “Zombies, Vampires, and Black Folks: Not-Human Human Monsters in The Gilda Stories and Dread Nation” explores how the figures of zombies, vampires, and southern Black folks interrogate the limits of the monstrous as “not-human humans.” She reads the zombie as lacking essential qualities of humanness, such as will and vitality, and the vampire as overabundance of those qualities, such as immortality and historicity. Black folks, she argues, have both an overabundance and a lack of those qualities. She examines how Gomez and Ireland imagine the South is a meeting ground for not-human human monsters, configuring zombies and vampires as among its native children, and stage manifold confrontations between these monsters and the Black enslaved and their descendants, whose corporeality, physicality, and excision from participation in the national body-politic codes them as monsters in their own right.

Jennie Lightweis-Goff’s “My Favorite Monster: True Crime and the Southern Sacrifice Zone” examines the presence of the South in the canon of true crime, which she interprets as a successor genre to the midcentury Southern gothic. She considers the vestiges of the supernatural in familiar southern stories, from the Devil that demanded sacrifice in the West Memphis triple murder that led to the wrongful incarceration of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley, to the ghosts of serial killers Delphine and Leonard LaLaurie, who reliably feature in New Orleans ghost tours and as specters in FX’s American Horror Story. She considers the relationship between the haunted geographies of the gothic and the environmental sacrifice zones of the industrial South, taking seriously growing consensus about the connection between lead poisoning and spikes in violent crime.

This panel features a diverse array of perspectives with contributors representing diversity of institution, rank, tenure, race, and gender.