Mares in the Night Author's Notes: "The Deep South"

The Deep South 
 
             When I was in college taking film and video production classes, we were frequently assigned little short films as projects, 5-10 minute stories that had to adhere to some basic theme, but were otherwise free to do whatever with. Pressed for time and money, I was very quickly trained to come up with small stories on the fly. High-concept pieces that took place all in one setting with no more than 2-3 characters, focusing on ideas that had a big impact, with little room for anything more elaborate than that. It was kind of wonderful.

            The idea of an escaped slave coming across the Devil during his flight through the woods was one such story that I never got around to filming, and so I decided to turn it into a prose story instead. It was one of those ideas that come along every once and a while and just refuse to let you go, when it occurred to me that the Devil himself is a southerner--the ultimate Southerner, really--and the rest of it flowed out of that.

            There’s something about the American South… an unquantifiable, undeniable creepiness that seems to hover over everything like a fog, making the place a haunted region in the truest sense of the word. A land forever scarred by the sins of the past.

            In other words, it is entirely plausible to stumble upon the Devil whilst roaming the southern woods on a quiet evening.

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