"John Connolly returns with a prequel that goes back to the very beginning of Private Investigator Charlie Parker's astonishing career with his first terrifying case"--

The Dirty South examines the shifting significances of the South as a constructed, fantasized region in the American psyche, particularly its frequent association with tropes of dirt that emphasize soil, garbage, trash, grit, litter, mud, swamp water, slime, and pollution. Beginning with iconic works from the 1970s such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James A. Crank traces the image of a “dirty” South into the twenty-first century to explore the social, political, and psychological effects of the region’s hold on the imaginations of southerners and nonsoutherners alike. With a focus on media forms through which southern identity gets articulated and questioned—including horror movies, Swamp Thing comics, and popular music by artists such as Waylon Jennings and OutKast—The Dirty South probes the sustained fascination with southern dirtiness while reflecting on its causes and consequences since the end of the civil rights era. Highlighting the period from 1970 to 2020, during which the South began to represent several new possible identities for the nation as a whole and for the area itself, Crank considers the ways that southerners have used depictions of dirt to create and police boundaries and to contest those boundaries. Each chapter pairs prominent literary or cultural texts from the 1970s with more contemporary works, such as Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, which recycle similar investments or, critically, challenge the inherent whiteness of the earlier images. By historicizing fantasies of the region and connecting them to the first decades of the twenty-first century, The Dirty South reveals that notions about southern dirtiness proliferate not because they lend authenticity or relevancy to the U.S. South, but because they aid so conspicuously in the zombified work of tethering investors (real and imagined) to a graveyard of ideas.

An ex-football player, turned blues historian, has twenty-four hours to save the life of his friend.

College is a big adjustment—but not if you're Kenya Posey. Even at a Southern school far from her Jersey turf, she's the one the girls envy and the boys want. Kenya's the star of a hot singing/dancing troupe, her high-school BFF Lark is on campus—could things get any better? For Lark, the answer is yes. While she's flunking socially, life is one big episode of Everybody Loves Kenya—and Lark barely gets a walk-on role. Kenya's too self-absorbed to see beyond her fabulous new life. But with Kenya's brother Eric and his rapper friend Fiasco bringing drama right to her door, all that's about to change….

In an Arkansas jail cell sits a former NYPD detective, stricken by grief. He is mourning the death of his wife and child, and searching in vain for their killer. Obsessed with avenging his lost family, his life is about to take a shocking turn.