Southern Noir by Car: A Grit-Stained Road Trip Through the Dark Literary Heart of the South

Drive through the shadowy landscapes of Jesmyn Ward, James Lee Burke, Flannery O’Connor and more, tracing crime and gothic fiction where it first took root — in the haunted towns and backroads of the American South

Natalie C. Frank Ph.D June 6, 2025

Bird Girl statue from Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil cover; La Vie Exquise [CC BY SA 3.0]

The journey kicks off with a map, but not the kind you grab at a gas station. It’s more like a collage of dog-eared paperbacks and crumbling paper towns, some real, some imaginary, all heavy with humidity and haunted by characters who stick around long after you’ve turned the last page. To follow the blood trail of Southern noir, you don’t need a passport, just a tank of gas, a love for stories, and a curiosity to see what’s rotting underneath those towering magnolia trees.

This road trip’s not about sparkle; it’s about scorch. The South in these stories isn’t all romanticized fantasy. It’s hot, poor, violent, segregated, beautiful, and broken all at once. It’s the South of Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage, James Lee Burke’s New Iberia, Flannery O’Connor’s Milledgeville, and Larry Brown’s Oxford. It’s Savannah in the fancy veneer of John Berendt’s polite society, and the gritty, mean streets of Gainesville reimagined by Harry Crews.

Start your journey in Mississippi, where the air feels like metal mixed with memory.

Bois Sauvage, Mississippi (via DeLisle): The Storm and the Stillness of Jesmyn Ward

The town of Bois Sauvage is purely fictional — not on any map — but if you cruise down Highway 90 along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, you’ll start to get a sense of it. Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, and her hometown — more bone than blueprint — shaped the rural Black community in Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing.

You won’t see signs pointing to Bois Sauvage, but you will notice trailer parks sagging after hurricanes, dollar stores packed with bottled water, and cemeteries layered with storm debris and grief. Drive a little further inland, and you’ll spot the woods that swallow whole characters in Ward’s stories.

Stop your car for a moment and listen — there’s something strange in the silence, like a ghost whispering your name. That’s the presence of the past — ancestral, brutal, yet tender all at once. This is where everything meets — race, history, poverty, myth, and a deep, aching history that runs beneath every cracked porch.

Continue reading here.