Books And Bites

On this episode, we discuss Southern Gothic books, one of the prompts on the Summer-Fall Books & Bites Bingo reading challenge. Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of Gothic fiction--or, as Michael says, it's "Gothic with a twang." According to Book Riot, some of the characteristics of Southern Gothic include, “eccentric, flawed characters, sinister events, elements of the supernatural or fantastical, and themes relating to race, class, decay, violence, and isolation.”Our picks for this month include a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, a YA mystery, and a haunting, surprisingly spicy novel.Carrie’s PickThe Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora WeltyIn this 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning novella, Laurel McElva Hand, a widow in her mid-forties, travels from her home in Chicago to New Orleans, where her father is having a routine eye operation that proves fatal. Laurel and her crass, young stepmother accompany his body back to Mississippi.After the funeral, Laurel is left alone in her childhood home to reckon with her past an