Appalachia, Gothic Horror, and Villains: A Conversation with Andrew K. Clark https://ift.tt/jGbdkZV
In his debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow, Andrew K. Clark gives us a story that blends gothic horror and magical realism to create a haunting novel set in 1930s Southern Appalachia just outside Asheville. The novel centers on fifteen-year-old Leo who must navigate the challenges of a missing father, a bedridden ill sister, a mother on the brink of a nervous breakdown, a growing love for his female friend Lilyfax, and the charge to protect them all (including himself) from the sinister intentions and actions of school-age peers and older community members. While Leo deals with these immediate concerns, he and his friends become wrapped up in a larger evil at work: one where local women and girls are abducted and kept in a horrific, supernatural prison for nefarious desires. Leo aligns with a supernatural force of his own – the fabled wulver, a wolf-like creature with impressive size and speed – to help fight and take down those who have wronged him and those he loves. But as he and his wulver progress toward the bigger evil, the wulver’s own darkness begins to seep into Leo’s sense of judgment, threatening to overcome him.
Andrew K. Clark is a writer from Western North Carolina where his people settled before the Revolutionary War. His poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer was published by Main Street Rag Press and shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Award. His debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow, was released by Cowboy Jamboree Press in September of 2024. A loose sequel, Where Dark Things Rise will be published by Quill and Crow Publishing House in the fall of 2025. His work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review, The Wrath Bearing Tree, and many other journals. He received his MFA from Converse College.
Clark and I met in the heart of Asheville shortly before his novel debut. Over coffee, we discussed Appalachian folklore, the journey of accurately depicting Appalachian people and culture, how to develop character depth in a large cast, and how poetry influences Clark’s writing at the sentence level.
NOTE: This interview has been edited and condensed for length.
Your novel follows an age-old tale: the evolution of good versus evil, how these two facets exist in a delicate balance within all of us, and where the scales tip for certain people to the point of no return. There is a timeless folklore and some religious storytelling in this contained world and its specific time and place. Your novel reminded me of Stephen King’s ITand HBO’s Carnivale. What were some of the strings of inspiration for this novel, particularly around the wulvers and the folklore?
I wanted to do something a little bit new. In Southern gothic storytelling in general, there’s always this tension between religion, and always good versus evil. The people that I’m writing about and I grew up with literally believed there was a spiritual warfare happening between good and evil at all times. The Widow, for example, is based on people that I met growing up, and they would mix the old-time gospel religion with superstitions such as mountain haints. They didn’t see that as incongruous at all.
If you dig into Western North Carolina, you’re going to find a lot of Native American folklore, specifically from the Cherokee. But that’s not my story to tell. I decided I wanted to only focus on folklore that I can trace to my ethnic heritage as much as I possibly can. So I used the wulvers. They’re based on a Scottish myth, and I use them differently than they do [in Scotland]. I took the myth and played with it and sort of put them in this world that I wanted them in.
As a fellow writer born and raised here in Appalachia, I feel like there’s more pressure, now than ever, to accurately portray our people, our culture, and where we’re from. And this comes down to decisions we make with tropes, dialect, etc. What was that journey like for you when writing this book, while navigating dialogue, culture, feminism, race issues, faith, and mountain lore all in one book?
These characters are growing up in the 1930s in Appalachia. My reference point for them would be my grandparents; they grew up during the Great Depression in Appalachia, and their story arc is what you don’t see when you read literature about Asheville. There’s a gilded age where the Vanderbilts arrive, and there’s suddenly culture here. But if you went 15 minutes away from the Biltmore House, people were in abject poverty and shacks. The thing that always stuck with me is we see in the history of Asheville this big fall: first, there’s all this speculation happening in real estate, and people are moving here and buying second homes and it’s booming. Then there’s a bust and we have people jumping out of windows and buildings during the Great Depression.
But for people who were rural Appalachians, nothing changed. They were poor. They were struggling. They didn’t have healthcare; they didn’t have enough food. When the Great Depression happened, nothing changed. So that’s one thing I try to show is that fall for Asheville, but for Leo and his family, nothing changes.
This book is very much in the vernacular of my grandparents, my great-uncles, the elders in my church. I tried to be as true to that as I possibly could without feeling hokey or distracting the reader too much. This book is a love song to that older dialect that my grandparents had. It’s so rich and beautiful, but it’s almost characterized in movies as a sign of ignorance. If you listen to the ways they string words together, it’s poetry.
Speaking of poetry, Chapter 11 starts with this beautiful passage about how“the world folds up in wintertime.” Leo’s dialect is very rhythmic and very poetic, and I love it. How has poetry influenced your writing at the sentence level, and how did you approach the revision process?
I came to writing as a poet first. My first book was a book of poetry. When I was in high school, a friend of mine gave me Langston Hughes’s Complete Poems, and that’s the first time I read poetry that wasn’t Shakespeare. What it told me was, you can write in your vernacular because Langston Hughes does. I saw a lot of Appalachian language in Hughes, even though he’s in the Bronx in the early 1900s and couldn’t be more different, but Black people moved to the North from the South. There’s this sort of legacy in that language. I heard a lot of things that my grandparents said in his poetry.
Thomas Wolfe talks about this a lot in his book about how snow in the South is this magical thing. The previous scene [in Where Dark Things Grow] has a lot of violence and some trauma. So this opening chapter was a way to slow the reader down for a minute before we resume that journey into the darkness. I do pay close attention to the structure of the sentence and more so in revision than in drafting and how they sound. That’s really important to me. But also, I don’t want to slow the reader down. It’s always striking that balance. There was some beautiful, flowery language in early drafts that isn’t there anymore because it was in a scene where the reader needed to understand what was happening, gain context, and go forward in the story. It’s a balancing act. I want the poetry, but I want the reader to turn the page.
There’s fantastical good and evil, and then there’s real-life good and evil, and the people who live in that gray area. You blend and explore these lines in realized villains like Wake, Wormley, and the Ku Klux Klan. Wormley is a public figure who’s supposed to stand for good but is really acting always in self-interest. And then you have the Klan members who, even though you don’t really meet any of them as individuals, are constantly moving in the background of this time and place: a stand-in unit of evil and oppression. You get a sense that they’ve always been on the move throughout these mountains.
In the 1930s, Asheville was a hub for Klan membership. We had huge Klan rallies. People came from all over the country to meet here for their national meetings. There was no way to write a story, I think, that didn’t include them. As for Wormley, I think Southerners have a complicated relationship with the church. So on the one hand, we see the church do great things in our communities and help people. And we also see the hypocrisy. I’d argue that Wormley is the villain of the book. Wake is a horrible human being. He’s trafficking women. But he’s not saying he’s something that he’s not, right? Not the way that Wormley does. Even though we have supernatural characters, wulvers, etc., the sort of true evil is probably Wormley.
In the last third of this book, we the readers notice some really surprising character depth to the Goat, Maude and with Ezra, and –trying not to give anything away here –the Alchemist. How do you decide when writing these characters to layer more in beyond their archetypes?
The hardest thing to do as a writer is to take a character that you’re really not supposed to like, and who is doing something terrible, and give them nuance and depth. And so I purposely went into Wake’s story. I wanted him to have some nuance, not just be a caricature of a bad person. Here you have someone who’s doing something horrible: trafficking women and trying to gain political power through that. But at the same time, he has a code. He does not allow people to abuse women. He’s still a terrible person, but he has his own code of right and wrong. And when he has a chance to kill Leo, he lets him live.
And then the same thing for Goat. Goat is, for most of the book, this big hulking character, very abusive, very violent henchman. But I wanted to show some nuance in his character. So again, I think part of this is trying to have characters that are more than just that cardboard cutout, which is easy to do. Another thing that I did after some initial feedback from very early readers, was rewrite and deepen the female characters who were victims [in the story]. Because victims have a voice. I think that was very important.
Who are some other Southern or Appalachian writers working right now that you wish more people knew about?
Andy Davidson, Taylor Brown. More people should read Jesmyn Ward. She’s amazing. And she captures some of the things that we all love about Southern literature in terms of atmosphere and place. Stephen Graham Jones. Tessa Fontaine is a writer everyone should read. She’s originally from California but writes in this sort of beautiful, rich language that I think any Appalachian writer would connect with. Ron Rash is somebody that people should read more of, particularly his poetry. He’s known for his prose, but nobody talks about his poetry. His short fiction is masterful. In the Ozark Mountains we have Daniel Woodrell. When I have younger writers approach me and ask, How do you capture a lot in a short space the way you do? I’m like, no, no, no. Go read Daniel Woodrell’s The Maid’s Version. The opening chapters of that book are quintessential “How To Start a Novel 101” for me. One of my favorite poets is a guy named upfromsumdirt. He’s a Kentucky-based writer but writes these wonderful Appalachian cosmic settings in poems.
What’s next for you?
The sequel! Where Dark Things Rise is finished and it’s coming out next fall. It’s a loose sequel, so if you read one without the other, you won’t be totally lost. But it’s set in the 1980s. And there’s a few characters that overlap from this book that are now in their seventies.
I’ve had a few people say things like, “Well gosh, how did you publish something back-to-back?” But really, this is eight years of work. I didn’t write these and publish them in a year. I’m working on a second poetry collection, and then a third novel. The third novel is going to have that sort of horror, magical realism bent, but very different, totally different characters. I’m excited about it because I’ve lived with these characters in this world for a long time. It’s going to give me the chance to move on to something new.
FICTION Where Dark Things Grow
By Andrew K. Clark
Cowboy Jamboree Press
Published September 2024
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