"The most outlandish people can be a stimulus for love.’ A Southern Gothic novella on the eccentricities and vicissitudes of the heart."

"The Grandmama of southern gothic literature, O'Connor unabashedly tackles faith and faithlessness head on. Grotesque, funny and oftentimes creepy, these stories draw a picture of a society on the brink of moral bankruptcy. I find them more relevant today than ever....even on a desert island."

"I guess lastly is Baby Doll by Elia Kazan, where Karl Malden plays a sexually inexperienced husband, and his wife plays him for a fool, pretending to be a 12-year-old nymphette. Again it’s a very Southern Gothic, surreal, sexual perversion escapade. It’s another film I’ve watched many times and find it very hilarious."

"Why do the lives of writers seem so… train-wrecky? Mary Flannery O’Connor was no exception. She survived the back-to-back snake pits of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Yaddo colony only to find herself trapped at home with her strong-willed mother and crippling lupus. The life of this Southern Gothic belle makes the somber existence of Emily Dickinson look like a barrel full of monkeys."

"Call it Extreme Southern Gothic, New Orleans division. The protagonists of this dark French Quarter novel are knee-deep in murder, torture, sex and cannibalism. The story is unabashedly grim (or as Brite himself puts it, “twisted, horrific”), but Brite’s prose is crystal clear, and his literate tone is sufficiently wry and ironic that it creates a sort of safety zone in which readers not normally drawn to this sort of stuff (myself included) can take refuge while they read. But even arm’s-length readers are apt to find themselves being drawn further and further into the story—seduced in spite of the themselves. Material that would be merely sick, disgusting, and unreadable in the hands of a lesser writer is, with Brite at the controls, surprisingly erotic and captivating. It’s a tour de force, in a literary category all by itself."