The Pulse Remains by Rob Grimoire
Undertaker Books (August 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Broadbent
In a Southern Gothic novel, the past returns to haunt the present. Emphasizing moral bankruptcy and degeneracy, particularly of the upper classes, the genre has traditionally been dominated by white people and white stories — William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, and Michael McDowell.
That tradition often omits or elides the contributions of Black authors: Toni Morrison, Zola Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, S.A. Cosby, Tananarive Due, and Alexis Henderson. Like their white counterparts, these stories usually include traditional Southern Gothic tropes: the past intruding on the present, the moral and spiritual corruption of the elite, an emphasis on landscape and setting. Continue Reading
