Paranormal romance is right at home down South. It’s a well-known fact that the thin veil between the living and the dead, the present and the past, and the possible and the impossible just doesn’t exist in the South. There are grim reapers, ghosts of every size and shape, including Civil War fiddlers, pirates and time travellers and more wrought iron than you ever thought possible. Some writers have transplanted their series to a Southern milieu, like Angie Fox, who’s moved her merry band of biker witches into a field off Route 11 in Georgia, and Laurie London whose Sweetbloods may or may not have a dirty weekend planned in New Orleans. So, when issuing the challenge to the writers featured in The Mammoth Book of Southern Gothic Romance, I was pretty sure they were going to take to the subject matter faster than a knife fight in a phone booth. It’s plain to see that the Southern Gothic elements of menace, mystery, and magic aren’t more than a stone’s throw from the fantastical, creature-loving paranormal romance that we know and love. It’s always fascinating to see what fifteen feisty romance writers will get up to when you ask them to write in a subgenre they may never have written in before. And although Southern literature has a respectably long and storied history, it’s essentially the creepy, dark, ghost-ridden, crocodile-infested roots of Southern Gothic that we’re interested in at present. Just ask fans of Charlaine Harris’s Louisianaset, Southern-fried vampire fest that became TV’s True Blood. The states of the Southern USA have a bad reputation for great drama. First publication, original to this anthology.
“Date with a Demon Slayer” © by Angie Fox. “The Many Lives of Hadley Monroe” © by Bec McMaster. “Dream, Interrupted” © by Black Willow, LLC. “The Devil Went Down” © by Sonya Bateman.
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