Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe laid the foundations of Southern gothic, but the posts and beams were set by mid-century writers such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. Characters in these stories may try to ignore the past-especially America’s racist history-but it’s always encroaching, as relentless as the vines choking a decrepit plantation house. Sometimes the supernatural intrudes-ghosts rise up, or the Devil himself sidles in-but the most horrific transgressions are almost always the human ones. Turn over a rock and you’ll find it teeming with family secrets: incest, murder, madness. The stories are sticky with dread and unease, and the ripe atmosphere threatens to swallow everything. It’s a genre designed to make you uncomfortable. When it comes to Southern gothic, it’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity. Gregory ratchets up the tension with stunning prose, delivering a truly thrilling ride. Twelve years later, her grandmother, Motty, is found dead, and Stella must return to finish what she started as a child and fulfill her family’s destiny. Bootlegger Stella Wallace comes from a line of Birch women who were deemed Revelators due to their ability to communicate with Ghostdaddy, “the God in the Mountain.” But after she discovers the god’s true intentions and learns how the Revelators before her have died, Stella runs away from home, determined not to meet the same fate. In his new novel Revelator, Shirley Jackson Award winner Daryl Gregory spins an addictive tale of Southern gothic-tinged horror, set alternately in 19 in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains.
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