I can pinpoint one of my earliest moments of existential unease. I was nine years old and, defying my religiously conservative parents, snuck into the local movie theater to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I didn’t understand the social politics of the movie at the time, and while faintly aroused by Jessica Rabbit I remained thoroughly confused by the idea of bestial human/toon marriage.

Southern Gothic lingers impolitely in doorways. Forget theme; the genre itself is liminal, slouching somewhere between literary fiction and the h-word: lauded and discarded, high-brow and tawdry, praised and shamed. Tell about the South, right? But for all its liminality, Southern Gothic seems obsessed with physical location.

An important feature of childlore is that kids spread it to other kids, independent of adult instruction. Because as soon as parents got involved (or teachers, or adult authors of books marketed for children), that wasn’t really ours anymore, was it? That was somebody else’s lesson, written for us.

It is something that is just accepted: forests are places where things become lost. There is a dark, entangled history that grows in the shadows of the woods, weaving through myth and legend—through stories we have told and warnings we have whispered into the night. The forest is the void of the unknown, a ravenous mouth that picks clean the bones of trespassers because the forest has a stomach, and that stomach has never been full.