8 Surreal Books to Introduce You to Southwestern Gothic Horror
Things are just a little stranger out west.
The western United States, and in particular the southwest, with its mountains and mazelike canyons, holds a special place in our psyche. It’s a place where things are a little looser and less defined, a landscape of wide skies, vast plains and deserts, and hidden places. It’s a place with a violent history, a very long memory, and the kind of odd folk legends and traditions that come from living for a long time against that vast emptiness in a place where violence and injustice reigned. In horror, the West is a more liminal space than most, home to old ghosts, older gods, and where the memory and history of the land lie just beneath the surface, waiting to be reawakened. For your reading pleasure, we’ve assembled an eight-book primer to the strange, haunting genre of southwestern gothic, a roadmap to the strange, sinister places of the west.
