5 Horror Novels Set in Georgia and Written by Georgia Authors (Plus One Honorable Mention)

There’s something about digging for horror in your own backyard. You know the land, you know the creepy things that crawl in its loam, and in Georgia, you often end up with red clay under your fingernails. It’s a state with an earthy history, more than its share of darkness and injustice, and most types of terrain. Drive north into the old and worn Appalachian Mountains, southeast to a small wedge of shoreline and the faded grandeur of Savannah, and in almost any direction to pass through rural pockets that feel left behind.

In my novel Nightjars, a man who grew up near the looming Appalachians of North Georgia is told through photographs—pictures don’t lie, remember—that the life he’s been rebuilding is a lie, and that his repressed memories tell the real story. He must return to the mountains and hunt a monster, fearing that the monster is only himself, following in the footsteps of his father. This story could only exist in Georgia, I felt. I wanted to bring my state to life in every image, every skipped heartbeat, each sharp scent of pine needles. Nature as cathedral, nature as antagonist.

Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers knew how to tap the melancholy vein that was almost unique to the so-called Peach State, a vein rich with Georgia blood but little money. Back when they were altering the literary landscape, religious fundamentalism, the Jim Crow South, and a post-WWII glow mixed together in an ugly light. An entire genre of fiction—Southern Gothic—grew from the roots they and a few others put down, and it still resonates today.

American horror fiction is a cousin of Southern Gothic as much as modern British horror stems from the Gothic castles huddled atop foggy moors. And no matter where an author lays their head, it’s natural to write what they know and write where they know.

I shied away from that in my writing career, at least at first. I suppose I had this idea that I should avoid being typecast as a strictly Southern author. I set my first novel in Vermont (which I often feel is my spiritual home), but I wised up with my new novel, Nightjars, and slithered fully into the Georgian shadows I was born and raised in, with those ancient mountains peering down at me. I smeared red clay all over my hands.

Maybe I’m biased—of course I’m biased—but I believe that living among the Eastern pines and magnolias and dogwoods and mosquitoes and gospel hymns tunes a writer into the eerie frequency of Georgia. The state has its own special atmosphere, its own wild nature, and nothing seeps into and informs horror as much as atmosphere.

So here are five horror novels set in Georgia and written by Georgians.

*

Kristi DeMeester, Dark Sisters

In this beautiful novel of feminist rage, a curse binds women from three different eras. The 1700s, when being accused of witchcraft was a death sentence; the 1950s, when women were too often forced to bottle up their true selves to please men; and the dawn of the twenty-first century, when megachurches held immense power in their communities. (Too many of these things still hold true today, unfortunately.)

DeMeester weaves in plenty of lush imagery and references to keep the story’s Georgia setting prominent all the way to its horrific, cathartic finale.

Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

One isn’t supposed to call Flannery O’Connor a horror writer, and she wasn’t really, but don’t let anyone tell you it cheapens her work. Far from it. I have always firmly believed that many of her stories and this novel, in particular, throb with a terrifying, skin-crawling horror.

Anyone who’s read Lovecraft, Laird Barron, et al., can recognize the strong cosmic horror undertones as a fourteen-year-old boy tries to escape his uncle’s dark prophecy. It’s just that the Christian God is the entity here, not Cthulhu.

Andy Davidson, The Hollow Kind

Speaking of cosmic horror: The Hollow Kind brings an ancient, inscrutable monster into 1980s rural Georgia and easily transcends horror’s Lovecraftian forebears. This epic novel reminded me of old-school Stephen King recalibrated by weird Southern Gothic writers like Fred Chappell (think Dagon but more pleasant to read). A young mother flees to Georgia with her son to escape trouble, setting up camp at her grandfather’s old turpentine farm, where things will soon prove to be, naturally, even worse.

The land really comes to life in this novel, lush, ominous, heavy with atmosphere and expert prose. It continues to fester in my mind in the very best Southern Cosmic (if I may coin a term) way.

Katherine Daniel, When the Night Comes Knocking

This is the debut novel by Daniel, a new voice who already knows how to craft a fast-paced and plain fun Appalachian horror story. It’s a wonderfully simple premise: Local legends in the North Georgia mountains, check. A cast of characters trapped in a small space as Something tries to get at them, check. Secrets in their hearts that mark them, check.

It all unfolds like a great scary movie. Daniel is a writer to keep a very close (and possibly nervous) eye on for future horrors.

Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

A hugely successful novelist, Siddons only wrote one novel that came anywhere near the horror genre, but The House Next Door has lingered on Best Haunted House Novels lists for a reason. In their well-to-do Atlanta neighborhood that’s saturated with Southern Charm™ that might be only skin-deep, Col and her husband see their idyllic bubble disturbed by an ugly modernist house being constructed on the long-vacant plot beside them.

The novel is a more chilling read than most of its kind, and it’s always struck me as interesting that an author who was better known for other genres could get the revered haunted house trope so right on the first try. And it’s all the more fascinating because it asks a unique question: Can a newly built house, a home without a past, be evil?

Non-Georgian Honorable Mention

P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout

Let me close with a bit of cheating. P. Djèlí Clark is neither from Georgia nor currently here, but this novella set in Macon, Georgia during the 1920s—the center of the state and of the Jim Crow South—deserves a ring shout-out.

Blending cosmic horror with violent racism, Ring Shout positions a stunning and repulsive what-if: The members of the Ku Klux Klan weren’t humans wearing white sheets and robes but actual Lovecraftian creatures that only looked like humans wearing white sheets and robes. Imagine that vile clothing turning out to be not clothing at all but skin and flesh.

It’s a wild ride loaded with social commentary that’s still too relevant a century after the story’s setting.

***