Rachel Cochran's "The Gulf" is a literary thriller set in the fictional Texas gulf town of Parson during the 1970s. Parson is reeling after a severe storm wreaked havoc and catastrophic damage on its residents.
Even as the town works to physically rebuild, the depth of the psychological toll and forbidden pasts are just surfacing.
"Southern gothic, uniquely, is not just about hauntings or about the transgression of the unnatural or the uncanny into the natural space, but it's specifically about the American South and the violences that it committed," Cochran told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA."
"I consider 'The Gulf' a southern gothic because the ghosts are both kind of internal and external. They do things that are just ever so slightly unexplainable. But almost all of it has to do with the psychologies of the characters and their own individual experiences of guilt."
At the center of Parson residents dealing with guilt is Cochran's protagonist, the fiery Louisa "Lou" Ward. Lou is a handywoman by day and bartender by night and lives with her sister-in-law Heather and niece Sarah. Lou moved in with them after her brother Robby dies in Vietnam.
"(Lou) can sort of take care of herself in a way that I think I really admire," Cochran said. "Particularly as a queer woman — closeted, of course — but clearly incredibly out of step with what her community expectations about her, her gender and gender performance should be so very visibly a sort of other, an outsider which could make her a victim of potential violence."
Lou spends her days fixing up Parson House, an old plantation that's been converted into a historic mansion. She does this for Miss Kate who mysteriously bought Parson House after the storm and happens to be the mother of Lou's first love and childhood friend, Joanna.
She spends her evenings bartending at Buck's, one of the rowdiest bars in town, and avoiding arguments with Heather, whom she has formed a secretive love affair with, about moving to San Antonio.
"Everyone else seems to be fleeing Parson in the aftermath. There's no real reason to rebuild because the storm did so much damage. But Lou is very stubborn, and she clings to Parson, she doesn't want to leave. It's the only sense of home that she's ever had or ever known," Cochran said. "So, she's a little stuck in the past, a little sort of drawn back into those moments from her youth."
Then, Lou finds Miss Kate dead in the Parson House garden. The town quickly conspires to rule Miss Kate's death a suicide and move on, but something about the situation nags at Lou. Her suspicions only grow when the enigmatic and estranged Joanna returns to Parson to settle Miss Kate's estate.
"Lou blames Joanna for basically everything that has gone wrong in her life since Joanna left suddenly, right at the beginning of the school year, their freshman year of high school. There are some reasons Lou blames Joanna that are fair and that follow a kind of logic, and then there are others that feel like obsessively, tempestuously an extension of Lou's more stubborn, more self-isolated, self-obsessed kind of side of her personality," Cochran said.
Lou and Robby were abandoned by their mother as children and taken in by their Aunt Cece. Cece's Mexican-American heritage had to be kept secret to keep the kids in a prestigious all-white school and Robby's football stardom alive.
"Lou's logic is that Joanna told the big secret about Aunt CeCe and made the community suddenly aware of and questioning of Lou and Robby's parentage. So they ended up being moved to the other school with fewer resources," Cochran said. "Lou blames Joanna for the fact that her brother ended up still stuck in this town when the Vietnam draft came calling, and he eventually lost his life in Vietnam. So Lou draws a tenuous connection between Joanna's betrayal when they were children to her brother's death in Vietnam many years later."
Certain frustrations and passions are reignited when Joanna arrives at Buck's out of the blue one night to ask Lou to finish fixing up Parson House so that she can sell it.
Cochran weaves in so many more fleshed out characters including friends, relatives and residents that are entangled in some way, shape or form — be they former classmates, church congregations or lovers — to the mystery around Parson House.
"I am an obsessive outliner, and I use spreadsheets on my computer to outline the book," Cochran said. "There's a lot of moving pieces in the book and it took a lot of obsessive planning and careful sort of X-raying of the novel as I went along and as I went back through for revision to make sure everyone's sort of on the right tracks throughout."
There's an irreverent meta-moment in the novel where Lou ponders to herself during her journey to solve the nagging question of Miss Kate's death, that there's so many people who could've been behind it, but Cochran uses that to her advantage.
That juggling of characters adds to the book's propulsion and tension rather than bogging it down. These characters all shade and reshape Lou's perspective on things that alter ours as readers as well. All of it leads toward a conclusion that's both earned and ultimately internal.
"I was reading a lot of these more literary mysteries where the thing that happens is more about unlocking a person's truth than it is about any big kind of fireworks," she says. "I think one of the most dramatic things that we do in our real lives is we learn new information about people we thought we knew and that new information, that new perspective totally changes our world. And it can rock us more deeply than any external event ever could."
"The Gulf" is out now from HarperCollins.