America’s greatest writers have always been Southerners. William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams – sure, there are greats from other regions of the country, but for every incredible Yankee author you can point to, I could probably rattle off the names of three equally accomplished writers from the south.

There could be any number of explanations for this phenomenon, but I think the simplest and most obvious one is that great literature is often built out of trauma, and the South has had more than its share of those. And so have the characters in David Joy’s Where All Light Tends to Go, and so will they again, and again and again over the course of the novel’s 260 pages.  Continue reading →