Writing the Land: How Setting Becomes a Character in Southern Fiction
- TH.Malcolm
- Aug 19
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 4
In Southern noir, the land isn’t just where the story happens—it is the story.
The mountains don’t just rise in the background—they loom, silent and watchful, bearing witness to generations of secrets. Hollers don’t just echo sound—they carry grudges. And dirt roads? They remember every tire tread, every set of boot prints, every body dumped under cover of darkness.
When I write, I don’t treat the setting like window dressing. I treat it like a character with its own mood, history, and agenda. The Southern landscape shapes how people live, how they die, and everything that happens in between. Weather turns hostile, terrain gets you lost, and isolation becomes either a hiding place or a trap. Sometimes both.
Take the Appalachian foothills. You can be surrounded by people and still feel like you’re the only soul for miles. That kind of space creates a different kind of fear—a slow, creeping one. And when someone disappears in those woods? They stay disappeared. Because the land doesn’t always give up what it takes.
Or think about the swamps. Beautiful. Treacherous. Teeming with life and death. It’s a metaphor and a murder weapon in one. As well as a dumping ground for anything that you don’t want to see the light of day again. You don’t run from danger in a swamp—you wade through it, hoping you don’t step wrong and sink. Or get eaten by something with big, sharp teeth.
In my stories, characters respond to the land as much as they do to other people. It shapes who they are. A woman raised on hard soil and harder winters walks different than one raised in a clapboard house by the Gulf. One knows the weight of silence in the mountains; the other, the threat behind a breeze that smells like rain and blood.
The Southern landscape is visceral. It smells like honeysuckle and rot. It’s blistering hot one day and icy cold the next. It holds memory like a dried-up creekbed—waiting to flood the first time the past gets stirred.
If a body turns up, the land’s already told you it would. You just didn’t know how to listen.
So when people ask how I build setting, I don’t just describe it. I give it motive. I let it breathe, bear down, and sometimes bury the truth deeper than any character dares to dig.
