The best books to summon the off-kilter beauty of the grotesque

It's almost impossible to dive into Southern Gothic narratives without exploring the work of William Faulkner at some point, and his collected stories are a great place to start. Specifically, the story "A Rose for Emily" pretty much created the Southern Gothic literary genre. The writing is beautiful, evocative, haunting, and a springboard for the aspirations of many Southern writers, myself included.

The black-and-white images of Ralph Eugene Meatyard have long fascinated me and informed my visual work and writing. Meatyard was, by profession, an optician in Lexington, Kentucky, yet his personal passion was making photographs. His subjects were his wife, children, and family friends, who he often posed in murky settings as they wore masks and held dolls. These images are both disquieting and euphonious, tapping into something primal that hints at the secretive world of childhood.

Taking place in rural Northern Ireland during the 1960s, The Butcher Boy tells the story of young Francie Brady, a misanthropic, confused Roman Catholic kid whose alcoholic father works in a slaughterhouse. Francie's first-person narrative is at times very funny, at other times very bleak, yet the novel is infused with a poetic lyricism that frames its protagonist with a curious empathy, even as the story veers into dark territory.

This is one of my all-time favorite novels, though I'm not quite sure how to explain it. Set in a small Texas town, Come, The Restorer is a strange, hallucinatory, and comical novel where nothing is quite normal, in fact far from it. Among the cast of characters are Mr. de Persia who becomes a prophet to the townspeople after he is discovered in a glass bathtub with an erection, the virginal Jewel Adair who following her husband's fiery death begins roaming the countryside naked, and Addis, Jewel's adopted son, who is on a singular quest to make himself a Panhandle saint. There's just no other book like this one.

I have yet to meet someone who doesn't love this novel, though I'm sure there must be plenty of Amazon reviewers that hate it. Katherine Dunn's masterpiece chronicles the Binewskis, a drug-addled carny family who set out to breed their own circus freaks. Hilarity, violence, sibling rivalry, and all manner of insanity ensues as the reader encounters, among others, Arturo the Aquaboy, Siamese twins, and an albino hunchback. What else can I say? It's wonderful, funny, and unsettling in equal measure, and as epic a family story as anything Steinbeck undertook.