Everyone knows the giants of southern literature, because they’re also giants of literature, full stop. William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Harper Lee, Robert Penn Warren, and so forth are perennials in lit courses and high school English classes. When it comes to horror, though, there isn’t the same respect. New England gets Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, but names like Manly Wade Wellman and Cherie Priest aren’t nearly as widely known.
North Carolina’s John G. Hartness has set out to change that. An award-winning author himself, he also runs Falstaff Books, an independent publisher tasked with bringing southern fantasy and horror to a wider audience. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his endeavor and the philosophy behind it.
Alex Bledsoe: Why do you think Southern horror and fantasy isn’t as well known and celebrated as Southern literature in general?
John Hartness: I think horror in particular, and genre fiction as a whole, is kinda locked in a closet and fed through a slot in the door as a general rule, because there’s a segment of the book buying (and selling, and publishing, and writing) community that thinks that it’s “lesser” somehow, because it’s written with commercial intent. It goes to this bizarre concept we have of “doing it for the art,” as though artists don’t also have to pay a mortgage or, you know, buy food. The idea that commercial fiction is of lesser quality than “literary” fiction is abject horseshit. Shakespeare was a hack writing for his patron. Dickens was getting paid by the word to write serialized commercial fiction. The idea that a writer, or a work, cannot be both commercial and good at the same time, is some kind of weird BS that I can’t dive into without getting all historically sociopolitical on you. So basically Southern genre fiction doesn’t have the same high-tone cachet as “literary” fiction because some folx don’t think writers should make a living in their pajamas, just because they have to go into an office to do their job, and I go downstairs.
AB: Other than setting, what do you consider the essentials for weird fiction to call itself “Southern?”
JH: Even in the more pulp-styled Southern stuff that I write, there’s a pacing that is uniquely ours. It boils down to the way we meet and interact with people in the South, which is fifteen minutes of “how’s your mama?” and “now, where are your people from?” before we’ll tell the kid at the grocery store if we want paper or plastic. I exaggerate, but only slightly. I feel like Act 1 in a Southern novel tends to be a little longer, and the plot overall a little more circuitous, than in books set in other places. But where Southern fiction really sings is in the dialogue. There’s a music to the South that comes out when we speak, from the lilting, dancing minuets of South of Broad Charleston dialect, to the twangy, half-tuned banjo picking of West Virginia coal miners. The “Southern” accent is so broad, and so varied, that it’s almost like a New York accent. A person from Astoria sounds about as much like a person from the Upper East Side as someone from Savannah sounds like someone from LA (Lower Alabama ). There are more than half a dozen accents just in the Carolinas (and yes, I can adopt about five of them, depending on where I am and who I’m talking to – a theatre degree has its uses). So there needs to be that slight hint of lackadaisical summer torpor in the plotting, and there has to be music in the speech. It might not be pleasant music, but it’s music nonetheless.
AB: What inspired you to start your own publishing house? Why the name Falstaff?
JH: A couple of friends of mine asked me to beta read a book they were shopping, and give them feedback. I loved the book and told them if they didn’t sell it, I’d publish them. Six months later, I got the “were you serious?” email, and decided that since I was serious, I’d better figure out how to transition from self-publishing to publishing other people’s work. Five years and almost 250 titles later, I’m about to figure it out, I think. Another couple hundred books and I’ll know most of what I’m doing.
The Falstaff name came from my “career” as a poker blogger and journalist. I was playing poker with a friend at his house, and it was part of a gathering of poker bloggers, and we were (are) both named John. It gets confusing having someone always yelling your name and it not being you, especially if you’re a Leo (and therefore a narcissist) like me. So I asked for suggestions for a nickname, because I’ve never really had one that wasn’t egregiously insulting. Since I’m fat, my first name is John, and I have a theatre background, an overeducated friend of mine suggested Falstaff, after the character in Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry 4 & 5. My love for beer and the brewery of the same name didn’t figure into the suggestion at all, I’m sure. So I spent five years writing as Falstaff, and as John “Falstaff” Hartness, so when I transitioned from poker journalism to fiction (aka I got fired), I self-published under “Falstaff Books” to try and tie the branding all together.
AB: As a former winner of the Manly Wade Wellman prize, who else would you recommend to someone looking to see what’s out there in Southern weird fiction?
JH: Southern fiction is such a hugely diverse field that it’s really hard to narrow down. Michael G. Williams’ A Fall in Autumn, another Manly Wade Wellman Award winner, is a beautiful far-future LGBTQ+ noir detective novel. Jeff Strand is one of my favorite horror writers working today, and his stuff ranges from the hilarious to the horrific. We have a Falstaff title coming out late this year called The Devil Makes Three by Lucy Blue that I think is a truly astounding Southern Gothic horror novel dealing with racism and small town secrets that won’t stay buried, no matter how many bodies you pile on top of them. Cherie Priest has some fantastic stuff as well, from her Maplecroft novels (Lizzie Borden v. Cthulu) to Family Plot, where you can almost smell the Spanish moss. Stuart Jaffe’s Max Porter series of ghost detective stories have an awesome Southern setting and a great noir feel to them. And the Touch trilogy of novellas from A.G. Carpenter are spectacularly Southern and creepy.
Big thanks to John Hartness for taking the time to chat. Be sure and check out Falstaff Books for his latest, including this one, because, as the man himself says, “It’s a cat in a spacesuit. Why wouldn’t I promote that?”

One Comment on ““A Slight Hint of Lackadaisical Summer Torpor”: John Hartness on Writing and Publishing Southern Horror”
That may be the best title ever. Great interview!