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Southern Gothic is the neighborhood haunted by Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. The style features supernatural -- or seemingly supernatural -- grotesquerie, often in a backwoods or swamp setting, rooted in a cultural folklore steaming with themes of enslavement, racial tension, repression, rebellion, religious belief, family conflicts, and clan loyalty in which God or fate influence, if not outright determines, moral choices.

Tom Piccirilli and Lucius Shephard both take a trip down South to different, but equally disturbing destinations. Their routes offer different scenery, but in the end they both catch the essence of a man's soul frozen in their headlights.

In Piccirilli's A Choir of Ill Children (the title refers to the sound made by certain unfortunate characters, symbolizing the pain of the innocent), the narrator is the owner of "The Mill," a source of wealth and prestige -- as well as responsibility -- in the backwater town of Kingdom Come. Thomas (namesake of the skeptical disciple of Jesus who demanded physical proof of resurrection, source of the expression "doubting Thomas") inherits his position as "town father" following the mysterious death of his mother and his dad's suicide. He also inherits responsibility for his three brothers, who are congenitally conjoined at the head, three bodies sharing a single brain.

Thomas is troubled by a dream-like event from his childhood in which he stumbled across a murdered young boy in the swamp. The murderer, who has just lost a leg to an alligator, tries to lure Thomas as his next victim, but is outwitted. Thomas senses that the one-legged murderer is still stalking him.

There are other mysteries. A lost girl of indeterminate age who might possibly be the child the three-headed brother claims to have killed. The "Granny witches" who are trying to usher Thomas towards some portentous consequence. The incomprehensible warnings of his best friend Drabs Bibbler, who is possessed by the seeming babble of "tongues" through which the spirit of the Holy Ghost -- or is it the Devil? -- speaks. Peripherally lurking phantom-like is Maggie, Thomas's childhood sweetheart, ominously waiting to see if their relationship will be consummated while the reader wonders if she is real. Or if that's an irrelevant consideration. Additional ingredients to spice up this strange gumbo are a murdered nun, a pair of drug-addicted film students, a fencing biker, another brother lost at birth that may have been conjoined to Thomas, generous quantities of moonshine (of course), a steadily unbalancing private eye, and some highly unusual sexual relationships (which, along with the moonshine, you'd pretty much expect).

This is a brand of Southern Gothic that might be a tad too weird for its more famous practitioners. Wonderfully weird it is, though; even when the meaning is a bit hazy, the language alone is fetching.

"A wide but dull moon doesn't have what it takes to illuminate the inside of my truck. Whoever she is, she's doing all right in my lap without me. She smells of death, but that doesn't matter a hell of a lot at the moment. Her hair is a fiery red that might only be orange in the daylight, but for now is a mass of bobbing flame that spills across my belly to my knees... She drags her nails down my legs and back up again, making other little motions as if she's scratching sparse but powerful sentences into my skin. I try to make them out. It's a cursive script with well defined curves, crossed t's and dotted i's and hanging g's. Lots of passive verbs. There area a meager number of semi-colons but a fair amount of emphasis is drawn to certain words via italics."

David Soyka is a former journalist and college teacher who writes the occasional short story and freelance article. He makes a living writing corporate marketing communications, which is a kind of fiction without the art.