WHAT: Matthew Guinn and Steve Yates preview the 2018 Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration and introduce the theme, Southern Gothic

WHERE: Natchez Brewing Company, 207 High Street, Natchez, Mississippi

WHEN: Friday, October 13, from 4 p.m. until 6 p.m.

BOOK SALES: Turning Pages Books & More, Natchez, http://turningpagesbooks.com/

Some starter culture: Being of the Ozarks, I am not sure you’ll permit my speaking of a “Southern” Gothic. The Ozarks is that Balkan (we daren’t say Transylvanian) borderland between our lush South and the windswept, flat line of our empire’s Great Plains. So situate me where you will, please, as charitably among you or as the hillbilly troll blocking the mountain pass.

The Ozarks Gothic, probably very like the Southern Gothic, requires a paradise lost, preferably a mansion in or bound for ruin, a memory or ghost of a memory of glory that haunts all its decaying rooms, a seductive back lighting of forlorn despair, the uncanny perception by one or more characters of inevitability, and of course it requires throughout the dark embroidery of death.

We Americans, Southerners, and Ozarkers have dramatically advanced the Gothic, from undead creations, amulets and castles, and fevered monks to tangible monsters and complex, even culpable characters, people such as you and me. Trace if you will in your own reading memory the arc from Edgar Allan Poe’s breathless and sexless “The Fall of the House of Usher” through a psychological vortex such as Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” to the mastery, brevity, and the real horror of Truman Capote’s “A Tree of Night.” Gothic? Hold my zombie; we’ve got this.

In writing The Legend of the Albino Farm: A Novel, I intended to implode the most seductive and preposterous of my Ozarks hometown’s spook tales and replace it with a fiction gleaned from a fated, wealthy Irish Catholic family’s wills, deeds, and death certificates. You see, what actually happened at the Albino Farm was the real horror. I am right-handed, practical, an Ozarks realist. But I always write my fiction while a black cat sleeps in my left hand.

You can catch more of the mood of my novel from “The Legend of the Albino Farm” book trailer. See you in Natchez along with my friend and a novelist I much admire, Matthew Guinn.