Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology

by Joan Leggitt (Editor)

Fiction. "These stories will take you places you may never have imagined before, but in every case the wonder of the narratives will allow you to see over the walls of ignorance and indifference to the heart's core. Here you will find the exceptional, a bit of the absurd, and a lot of the unique, but all in all people who are bluntly making their way in a difficult world as stubbornly as anyone you might meet in a truck stop on the highway headed south."—from the introduction by Dorothy Allison

Contributors Sean Carswell, Vickie Weaver, Sally Bellerose, Dawn Davies, Rhett DeVane, Linda Dunlap, Jane Edwards, Emily Franklin, Peggy Kassees, Gale Massey, Dorothy Place, David James Poissant, Daryl Scoggins, Pat Spears, Jane St. Clair, Shane Stricker, Sheila Stuewe, Judith Turner-Yamamoto, Dorothy Allison

256 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2016

Reviews

[Judith Turner-Yamamoto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finely crafted stories. Happy to be part of this collection.

[kinsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

"maybe this one" i say as they drag me into a padded room book in hand

n e ways. the writing was amazing just not what i anticipated

[Hal Brodsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the finer anthologies I have read in a while. While I would not classify all of the stories as "Southern Gothic" (Some are not Gothic and some do not take place in the South) all are well written.
The wide variety of subject matter and writing styles also adds to the readability of the collection. Two of the stories were quite humorous and many contained hints of the pathos one wold expect from this subject matter, but without being overly bleak.
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and variety of this collection.