On one of the best days of my working life, I read a glowing review of my debut novel My Sunshine Away in Kirkus Reviews, a highly respected journal in America. The review ended with a proclamation that I have since gleefully memorised: “Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member.”

As a guy from Louisiana, as deep as the American south gets, this was mighty stuff for my ego. Still, I felt uncomfortable with that phrase “southern gothic”: had I written that kind of novel? The truth is, I hadn’t set out to. I had just tried to tell a story in the best way I knew how. And yet there I was, supposedly, at a cocktail party with some of the writers I most admired: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Barry Hannah, Zora Neale Hurston. I didn’t know what to make of it. And, now that my novel is being published in the UK, and with the literary world abuzz about Lee’s forthcoming Go Set a Watchman, I also have to wonder: why is southern gothic literature so popular across the globe?

Here’s my idea: the southern gothic is like a trusty bicycle. (Note: this is not simply because southerners talk too slowly for a car metaphor to work. It is instead a kinship in the way the two things are assembled and ornamented. Stay with me.)

First, the handlebars. What steers the southern gothic is authenticity. Look at the places the aforementioned “gods” of the genre are from. Mississippi. Georgia. Alabama. Florida. These are writers who spend their imaginative energy on the “postage stamp” of soil beneath their feet; writers who know, in other words, of what they speak. What makes this crucial to the southern gothic is similar to what makes a brother able to poke fun at his sister while beating up anyone else who dares make fun of her. It’s a family thing; an intimacy that readers from anywhere can relate to. Show me a southern gothic novel written by someone who’s not from the south and the odds are that I’ll show you a bad novel. To put it more smartly, there is a difference between writing from the culture and writing about or, at its worst, above it. The southern gothic is, always, from the culture.

Second, the basket. The basket on this bike is full of vivid characters. Scholars are quick to call them “grotesques”, as they are often deformed or bigoted or violent but, in the hands of a southern writer, they are written with empathy and truth. Tom Robinson, for example, the black man accused of raping a white woman in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, has a lame left hand. Mrs Dubose, the old lady who lives near the Finches in the novel, is a mean-spirited racist. For lesser writers, these are throwaway details used to make fun of the south. For Lee, though, Robinson got his hand stuck in a cotton gin when he was 12 years old; Mrs Dubose is a dying morphine addict struggling through the pain of getting clean before she meets God. This is not grotesque. This is hard work and a hard life, and these characters merely bear the physical scars of what many of us carry internally. Why do readers relate to this? Perhaps O’Connor nailed it best when she said: “I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.” The southern gothic, without exception, makes its characters loud and clear.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Brock Jones as Tom Robinson in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex

Third, the streamers. The bright streamers affixed to the handlebars of this bike are made of language. Southern writers are uniquely bonded by an oral tradition of front porch storytelling and find an outsized joy in constructing vibrant sentences (see Hannah’s work for the most acrobatic example of this). After all, we feel, if you can’t entertain your bourbon-drinking relatives, how can you expect to entertain a sober stranger? This is also apparent in the dialogue of southern gothic writers, who endow their characters with speech that is somehow wise without being didactic, as when the Misfit in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” describes the suddenly repentant grandmother he just killed by saying: “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” This is a perfect sentence, partly because of its grammatical flaw, and these colourful phrases brighten the dark themes of southern gothic novels to make for surprisingly joyful reading.

Fourth, the front wheel. The front wheel is the landscape. As it is the first part of an approaching bike that one sees, it is also the first thing a reader encounters when they enter these novels: beards of Spanish moss, dusty gravel roads, stubble-grass in the cotton fields. The natural world is alive and well in southern fiction and deemed gothic by its pervasive influence on the characters and their actions. And it’s true: the heat of the American south is indeed oppressive, and everything with a mouth, as they say down here, can bite. Yet it is ultimately the writer’s reverence for the natural world that sets these novels apart. Even the very forthright Scout, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, turns into a veritable poet when she describes her hometown, using alliteration in ways she rarely does elsewhere by saying, “grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square … Ladies bathed before noon … and … were like soft teacakes with frosting of sweat and sweet talcum.” It’s a song these southern writers sing to the landscape and it is made pretty for all readers by their admiration of it.

Looking back at To Kill a Mockingbird, and forward to Go Set a Watchman Read more

Next, the back wheel. The wheel that propels this bike is violence. Nearly all southern gothic novels revolve around it. For some it is rape, others murder, and for many it is the violent nature of God as seen by flooded rivers and hurricanes (see Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, respectively). What this means to the genre as a whole is that all of its novels have inherently high stakes, which readers appreciate. These are not quiet and domestic dramas, although they may be set in quiet towns. IPnstead, people’s lives are on the line in the same way that the readers’ lives are from the moment they open their eyes each morning to the moment they close them.

Finally, the frame and chain. What holds this bike together and enables it to go is the tortured history of the American south. There is no way around it. From slavery and prejudice through the civil war and Jim Crow, the American south has a past full of inexcusable ugliness. However, this is not the whole story, nor is it what makes this literature endure. Instead, it is the type of hero this past has created that keeps southern literature relevant and popular, and this hero is the underdog. Although it has been said that every person is the hero of their own life story, it is more accurate to say that every person is the underdog of their own life story. And though the civil war is long gone, the American south still suffers from its past in almost every conceivable way, whether it be poverty rates or failing education systems.

Yet those of us living there today did not personally create these problems. So, when we struggle to do the right thing, it feels as if we are doing so against incredible odds. This, I believe, is what readers from all parts of the world most identify with. We are all underdogs in the trial of our lives in the same fascinating and multiple ways that nearly every character in the courtroom of To Kill a Mockingbird was an underdog: Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch, Scout Finch, and even the poverty-stricken Mayella and Bob Ewell. They all thought they were doing the right thing, and they all thought nearly everyone else was against them. As Atticus Finch says in one of the most iconic lines of all southern literature: “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.” That is the definition of an underdog mentality, and a linchpin of great literature.

So, ultimately, the southern gothic is not held together by how different it is from its readers around the world, but instead by how similar, how respectful, and, in reference to this bicycle we’ve created, how moving.

But what about the seat, you wonder? The pedals? Well, they are built for you. Hop on.

• MO Walsh’s My Sunshine Away is published by Viking.