Southern Gods

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Southern Gods by the John Horner Jacobs

Southern Gods is the second book I've read written by the John Horner Jacobs, the first being Jacobs' well-written alt-hist fantasy The Incorruptibles.

This book has a different setting than Incorruptibles. The setting of that fantasy novel was an alternate Roman Empire that has managed to survive into the 19th century with magic, elves and dwarves. The setting of Southern Gods is our timeline Arkansas circa the late 1940s. The feel of the book is the old antebellum South, still segregated, without air-conditioning, just a little slower and more backward than the rest of the country, and just a little bit of the genteel aristocracy still living in fancy houses in the hinterland.

The focal character of the book is Bull Ingram, recently released from the army after his stint in the south Pacific after World War II. Bull is a very large man and easily adept at violence, so he's been working as a collector for people in Memphis who need that kind of thing done for them. As a change of pace, he's given an assignment from one of his clients to look for a missing record company salesman who has been pitching records to black stations in Arkansas. He's also given the task of seeing if he can't locate the performer of some very weird music that comes out of Arkansas on pirate radio wave lengths. Along the way, he slowly turns up information about the singer – Honest John Hastur – whose songs seem to possess people. In addition, he is shadowed by something dark and comes to blows with zombies and meets Sarah, a lovely separated woman in a southern Gothic mansion and Franny, her daughter and a rogue Catholic priest with a weird theology. There is also a library in the old house that contains disturbing books, named the Opusculus Noctis and Quanoon al islam, that are filled with unreadable text and hideous images.

The story starts slow, but the intensity climbs until it reaches a fever point of horror. The characters are well-developed and the ending is surprising. The writing is well-crafted. For some the book may seem long, but the pay-off at the end is worth the reader's patience.