I wanted to be sure to include at least one example of "southern gothic," a movement originally in the southern US focused on adapting gothic fiction to the time and region. Ramshackle or forbidding stone castles give way to ramshackle and forbidding houses built 100 years ago. Forests still darkle, but there are also darknesses in swamps.

The best practitioner of this was probably Flannery O'Connor. I still shudder when I think of Wise Blood. Here, in this short story, we can see how the hidden evil of the world isn't hidden at all, but misnamed by cranky people who insist that the veneer is the substance. It's gothic because it tears off a covering we had, keeping something awful out of sight. And all that with the simple mechanisms of a car ride and the frightening idea that what we were told were "good men" were anything but, even before The Misfit.