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The Language of the Night: T. Kingfisher's Southern Horror in "A House with Good Bones" [1]

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Date: 2023-10-02  

T. Kingfisher (pen name of Ursula Vernon) lives on a small farm in North Carolina. If you follow her on social media, you know about the Choose Your Own Adventure games she occasionally runs; her hilarious (and now largely expired) dust-ups with Shepherd, who lived on a yurt on her property before moving out west; her spouse’s gentle stewardship of a variety of chickens; and her passion for gardening, especially for native species. If you read her books, you know her (mostly) signature deadpan, practical and often anti-magic protagonists. In three of her recent horror novels, the skeptical protagonist meets rural North Carolina, and the result is definitely Not What You Expected.

I wrote last year about a couple of these books, in the context of them being literary conversations — works based on or inspired by the works of other authors. But I have not talked about them on their own, and it’s time to fix that.

I decided to put these three novels — The Twisted Ones, The Hollow Places, and A House with Good Bones — together to talk about over the next few weeks, not because they’re united by theme or style, but because they’re united by place, and that place is not your archetypal Southern setting, but is inimitably Southern nonetheless.

What is Southern fiction?

Like Louis Brandeis’ famed definition of pornography, you know it when you see it.

There are a couple of characteristics that flavor Southern fiction. The first is a deep connection to place, especially to the land. It’s more a mood, a zeitgeist, than anything else — a consciousness of history and an alienation from the rest of the country. Usually we see an idealized (or satirized) consciousness of the past, especially around racism, which remains the South’s (and the whole nation’s) Original Sin.

Southern literature also is Jesus-mindful. And Jesus is not usually the gentle-Jesus “I stand at the door and knock” variety, but the “I come in power to separate the sheep from the goats and you are definitely not a sheep” Jesus. Expect a Baptist-level anxiety about the Hereafter, yoked to a strict moral structure and a culture of gleeful rule-breaking by good ol’ boys.

And then there’s the whole “War of Northern Aggression/Lost Cause” thing.

Kingfisher’s take on Southern literature is interesting. For one thing, I won’t believe that the way she treats the genre is unconscious — no, it’s deliberate. She keep the attachment to place, the groundedness of Southern fiction, and uses it to examine and upend (the critical term is “subvert”) the expectations that attend Southern fiction and break the stereotypes.

For starters, there’s the Civil War stuff. Searching through her three Southern books, I’ve found exactly one reference to the Confederacy:

There was an old painting over the fireplace, one that had hung there as long as my grandmother had been alive. It was an oil paint, or at least trying to look like oil paint, and featured an old-timey bride and groom standing together under an arbor of pale pink roses, gazing into each other’s eyes with expressions of wistful bliss or blissful wist or whatever the hell you call that particular sappy expression. This would have been merely tacky if it had been an ordinary bride and groom, but the groom was wearing a military uniform in Confederate gray, which made it tacky and racist. A House with Good Bones, pp. 13-14

Sam, the protagonist, reminds her mother that she had called the painting “Lost Cause bullshit,” and Mom deflects. It, and the fact that the entire house has been returned to the style the grandmother Mae preferred, is a clue that something is up.

That’s it. The single thing that dominates discussion of Southern consciousness (inextricably linked with the racism) is the four-year period when (most of) the states south of the Mason-Dixon line were another country. William Faulkner and his hangover of the Civil War has passed into irrelevance in Kingfisher’s fiction.

High time, too. There’s a lot more to being Southern than the ancestor worship. There’s sweet tea, for instance, although Kingfisher’s heroines show a distinct preference for coffee (as do almost all the contemporary Southerners of my acquaintance — hell, we practically mainline the stuff). Southern tea has too many calories and too many of us are peri-diabetic.

So. For the next three weeks, we’ll go to North Carolina, and the weird, wonderful, off-beat, and quintessentially Southern in Kingfisher’s horror.

A House with Good Bones was published by Tor this year, and features the horror that inhabits the average Southern tract house subdivision.

Lammergeier Lane was a type of subdivision we have all over the South . . . You’ll be driving along a rural road, surrounded by trees, cow pastures, and the occasional business that sells firewood, propane, and hydraulic repairs. Then you’ll see a dilapidated trailer and a sign for a private drive. You turn onto the drive and suddenly there are a dozen cookie-cutter houses lining the street . . . . The subdivision looked exactly the same as it had when I left. It had hit that stage where all the covenants have lapsed and someone has put in a chicken coop and someone else’s lawn is going to seed — I approve of this, it supports far more insect life — and theres a truck on blocks tucked almost out of sight behind a shed. Subdivisions can persist in this particular developmental stage for decades before they finally pupate into their adult form and become a neighborhood ripe for parasitizing by developers. (p. 4)

For the record, I have never seen a subdivision pupate into an adult form, but this part of Virginia might lag behind North Carolina in the subdivision race, although we have more than our share of falling-down abandoned farmhouses. But I digress.

The action in Good Bones unfolds over nine days when the protagonist, Samantha, goes home to the house where she grew up, a house her mother inherited from her grandmother, a grandmother who was a holy terror. We start weird and go from there. Actually we start with roses. And vultures:

There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother’s house. As omens go, it doesn’t get much more obvious than that. p. 3

It’s quintessentially Southern to have vultures around (I just looked out the window and watched three riding thermals over the mountains). I’m sure other places also have vultures, but most observers let them pass by in silence, which is a shame. Inextricably linked with death, mythological psychopomps, and essential disposers of roadkill, vultures are cool. They don’t, however, hang out on mailboxes, as a general rule. They’re intelligent birds, and wary of people, so the presence of the vulture on the mailbox is what you might call a signifier.

As to the roses, the novel is divided into days, each day headed by a breed of rose that still flourishes in Grandma Mae’s yard. We start normally:

The First Day Winchester Cathedral: An old-fashioned English shrub rose. Grows to four feet high and four feet wide. Produces masses of large, loose-petalled white roses, occasionally with a touch of pink. Fragrant. Repeat bloomer.

Winchester Cathedral is a real rose. As the days pass, however, reality and a fictional garden part company. For instance, Ladybug rose, day three’s rose, is real, a low shrub rose that doesn’t smell, while the fictional rose is a climber with a sweet fragrance that “contains notes of apple and grape” (p. 41). Day two is a private joke, as the “Beverly Jenkins” rose doesn’t exist, except as a tribute to Black Romance novelist Beverly Jenkins. The succeeding days’ roses highlight the plot points as malign (and dead) Grandma Mae asserts increasing influence over Sam and her mother.

In life Grandma Mae might have dreamed of being a quintessential Southern “bless your heart” grandmother, all soft edges, sweet tea, and homemade cake (my husband had an aunt who was just such a person, and she still occupies a warm place in the family folklore) but Grandma Mae was instead a razor-sharp poison magnolia. She too is a stereotype, one not often depicted. She is driven by something she would call love, but it’s not a love that an emotionally healthy person would recognize, one that relies on domination and cruelty in return for safety. If Grandma Mae went to church, it would have been the fire/brimstone snake-handling variety, but that’s about as far as Kingfisher tips her head toward religiosity in any of these books. The Twisted Ones features another nightmare of a matriarch, suggesting a complicated power dynamic that operates in too many Southern families. We’ll talk more about evil meemaws next week, with The Twisted Ones.

There are two evils at work in A House with Good Bones. The first is the mundane one — the magical menace of the underground children and whence they come. This evil isn’t particularly geographic, but is a delicious sendup of the Aleister Crowley-type mysticism that dominated occultism during the last century. It’s quite creepy. While Sam’s great-grandfather Elgar Mills didn’t apparently exist, his friend Jack Parsons did, and he was acquainted with Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard:

I don’t like to step on anyone’s religion, but when you start mixing cocaine, free love, amphetamines, statutory rape, mescaline, and ritual black magic, you have crossed out of the religious-tolerance zone and into the perhaps-you-should-be-kept-away-from-other-people zone. p. 138

Oh, and he was a rocket scientist who helped to found Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, although Nasa doesn’t much like to talk about that. Anyway, Parsons’ friend Elgar Mills starts the evil ball rolling, and his daughter Grandma Mae is caught up in its penumbra. To reveal much more than this would be to spoil the fun and horror of the creepy occultists, so I’ll refrain.

The second evil is the more subtle one: it’s the abiding familial rage and hate that infects generations and reaches out to grab the ankles of their children who try to break free of the past, who smother ability and creativity in the name of protecting, who impress the molds of the past on the generations of the future. Love as ownership, love as control, love as cruelty — this evil is the more insidious, if only because it wears such a mundane face.

In that, Kingfisher’s Southern fiction is very Southern. Well, that, and the depiction of terrible internet service. That’s Southern, too.

Next week, another nightmare grandmother and another horror-in-an-unlikely-setting story. Meanwhile, imagine the horrors that lurk in a sunny subdivision that’s not off the set of Poltergeist. You can find horror anywhere — all you have to do is dig under the bushes.

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