TH.Malcolm

A city can bury the truth under noise and lights. A small town does it with memory, manners, and a casserole dish. That’s one of the reasons rural noir and Southern crime fiction hit the way they do.

Anybody can write something brutal. Blood is easy. Misery is easy. You can stack up dead bodies, ugliness, and human destruction—and self-destruction—until the cows come home, and that still doesn’t make it noir.

In Southern noir, choices do not disappear once they’re made. They seep into the ground, into the family, into the town, and into the people left standing. That is part of what gives the genre its weight. A lot of people hear “dark fiction” or “noir” and think first of violence, depravity, corruption, or a generally ugly view of human nature. Fair enough. Those things may be present. But darkness by itself is cheap.