Donald Harington, who created a surreal rural mini-world in more than a dozen novels set in the fictional Ozark hamlet of Stay More, Ark., died Saturday in Springdale, Ark. He was 73 and lived in Fayetteville, Ark.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his wife, Kim.

Mr. Harington, who never achieved popular success but attracted a devoted cult following, blended myth, dreamscape and sharply observed Ozark speech and manners to depict a rural society whose richness and eccentricity drew the inevitable comparisons to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

He rebuffed attempts to classify him as a regional writer, telling The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2000: “Regionalism is a term of opprobrium, condescension or contempt. The term ‘regionalist’ doesn’t really say anything about a writer except that the writer prefers writing about a specific place.”

That place, Stay More, whose residents Mr. Harington called Stay Morons, turned out to be a strange one, populated by shrewd hillbillies, reclusive millionaires, an itinerant motion-picture projectionist, a candidate for governor who wants to abolish hospitals and schools, and, in “The Cockroaches of Stay More,” talking insects who constitute their own Ozark subsociety.