Southern Spaces

The grotesque in American literature is a literary act of sublimation; it stands in for the things we can't talk about it, whether that thing is race, religion, or the delusions of a defeated population. Edgar Allan Poe, who popularized the grotesque in his fiction, gives us his paranoiacs, his deformed, disabled, and incestuous characters to comment on racial purity, alcoholism, and other defects in a supposedly great new nation. William Faulkner's taboo subject is the past—the true past, without the illusions that accompany the grand Lost Cause. Flannery O'Connor's is religion, or secularism, depending on your point of view. Whether it's a self-punishing preacher or a hog farmer's wife, her characters suffer from the same estrangement from the one, true faith, for which there is no substitute. The southern gothic, then, is a way of explaining what otherwise cannot, or will not be, explained. The truth is unbelievable; indeed, outlandish in a nation conceived in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. And yet these tales of murder and lust, of obsession and denial, are as persistent as the humidity that is an exhausting feature of a southern summer. They endure because they speak to the paradox inherent in the American project and the contradictions in human nature. Two new novels try to situate themselves into this tradition, though each has its own motivation for referring back to it, for effects both serious and humorous.

In M. David Hornbuckle's The Fireball Brothers, the grotesque appears in every form possible, from human to extraterrestrial, in a comic romp across Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Charles Dodd White's In the House of Wilderness has his characters trek throughout Appalachia, and he is far more circumspect in what he targets as bizarre and monstrous. But both books can't look at the strange and surrealistic without taking up the subjects of space and time, again in all their permutations. The distances of the American south seem to have their own effect upon time, and time is both an enemy and equalizer in a world crisscrossed by highways but still improbably lonely. These authors are after more than the shock of poverty and its privations: something deeper than language, how and why people communicate their dreams and fears to one another. In both books, circumstances ultimately preclude the most meaningful communication, though characters try, through music, photography, and the simple kindnesses they offer.

Hornbuckle's investigation into the grotesque begins in a rural Alabama lake in summer 1959. It's the year the small world Robert and Wally Mackintosh have always known seems to be coming apart. A meteor hits their swimming hole and the two teenagers are suddenly fused together in a freakish posture: Wally is slung over Robert's back, with his hands fastened atop Robert's heart. Nothing can detach them, though it's possible an unscrupulous and unlicensed doctor can do what the US government and accredited hospitals and physicians cannot. Robert, Wally, and their father take to the road as a musical act to raise money for the operation while their hometown becomes mired in conspiracy theories and recriminations, both global and domestic.

Robert is the ostensible narrator of Hornbuckle's yarn; he begins and ends this story of aliens, a pilfered inheritance, a religious cult, drinking, adultery, carnival barkers, and snake oil salesmen. But the story is told through several viewpoints, and Wally's is never one of them. And yet it is Wally who is most changed by this odyssey. A budding musician who's barely able to contain himself, he is almost prophetic about his plight, if the clues he provides are taken seriously. During their travels, Wally "naturally assumed the authoritative role of bandleader, but it surprised Robert to hear him speak with such confidence."

Wally's relative silence—perhaps ironic, since Wally is the voice of the...