Brought To Book
ALIX E HARROW
Due south: the American writer tells us about her latest novel
Words by Jonathan Wright
HOW DO YOU ENGAGE WITH SOUTHERN Gothic? Especially if, as in the case of Alix E Harrow, the very term takes makes you think of Toni Morrison, the Nobel-winning novelist whose Beloved drew on one of America’s richest literary traditions to explore the psychological effects of slavery, to devastating effect.
“What are you even doing?” Harrow asks rhetorically down the line from her home. “How can you play in that sandbox?” Perhaps you do so because it’s time and you suddenly have no choice. Two years ago, Harrow and her family left Kentucky for Charlottesville, Virginia. “We’d sold our house and we were moving, and I was finally like, ‘Oh, I have to write my Kentucky book now,’” she says.
The result is Starling House, a haunted home mystery that’s as rich and strange as any novel you’ll read this year. The setting is important because Harrow wasn’t just engaging with a literary tradition, but with history too. “The best Southern Gothic, I think, is rooted not just in the American South broadly, but with a specific farm or place, or a piece of land,” she says, adding that she thinks of the book as “Kentucky Gothic”.