“The Lake” by Tananarive Due will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. T.J. McIntyre interviews her on the story.
This story has a very southern gothic feel to it. What do you think it is about southern settings that inspires so many gothic stories?
“The Lake” is set in the fictitious town of Graceville, Florida (not to be confused with the real Graceville, Florida), and it’s part of an ongoing series of short stories I have written set in a town where characters experience paranormal experiences during the summers.
Another of my Graceville stories is a novella called “Ghost Summer,” in which some children come across the ghosts of missing black boys whose disappearance sparked a race riot in the 1920s. Townspeople believed the boys were the victims of racial violence, but they’d been chased into the woods by a loose dog and fallen into a well. The town suffered a lot of bloodshed over that misunderstanding. There was so much pain, so many untold stories, buried in the South. As writers, we feel those secrets whispering to us.