Lush Rot: Flannery O’Connor, True Detective, Southern hip-hop, and the gnarled roots of Southern Gothic.

I was asked by Guernica to write about something related to Southern Gothic and I went a little nuts cramming in everything from Dirty South hip-hop and Flannery O'Connor to kudzu vines and The Walking Dead.

If the Gothic was ethereal in England, it became earthy in the South. Where Emily Brontë writes of mythic lovers in candlelit parlors, William Faulkner writes of an impoverished family dragging their mother’s corpse through the countryside.

The essay is part of Guernica's awesome Southern issue that also features Kiese Laymon, Laura van den Berg, Catherine Lacey, Jamie Quatro, and a bunch of others.