Southern Gothics aren’t dead – just really bizarre. Witness Lucius Shepard’s SOFTSPOKEN, which starts out as a typical Gothic novel, with married couple Sanie and Jackson moving back to the old sfamily homestead, long rundown.
The reason for the move is that Jackson is studying for the bar exam, while Sanie is left to her own devices. And that’s when the weirdness begins. Sanie hears voices that she believes is a ghost of some sort, but thinks it’s her peyote-popping brother-in-law behind it. Or perhaps her sister-in-law, who is in her own world all the time, anyway.
The novel moves on like this with Sanie hearing these voices asking her to see them. All the while, Sanie gets the feeling that she and Jackson are drifting apart, especially with him focusing more on his studies. Then Sanie meets an old acquaintance of the family, Frank Dean, a former BMOC-type who has come back to town with his tail between his legs.
Now if the book continued with this type of love triangle with the additional ghost element, it would have been really engaging, with Sanie looking into the family’s history but turning up more questions than answers … which leads to my problem with the story.
The book takes a really weird turn with the explanation as to why the ghosts roam around the home. For me, it felt like that idea was tacked-on instead of continuing with the disillusionment of the marriage; the payoff we’re given came out of nowhere, I felt.
Still, for this type of modern Gothic, it’s miles ahead of others in the genre. –Bruce Grossman
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