If you’ve ever gone hiking in North Georgia or spent a weekend in one of its small towns, you know there’s something about the mountains that sticks with you long after descent. From vast, lonesome landscapes and untouched forests to Appalachian culture, the state’s Piedmont region is in equal turns spooky and enchanting. It’s no surprise that Georgia’s novelists have found that ground to be fertile inspiration for their work.
“When you stand on the overlooks [and] look out, there’s a life that’s just thrumming in it,” said Decatur author Sharon E. Yarbrough. Her book, The Land of the Dancing Rabbits (2024), follows a wrecked motorcyclist’s surreal and unlikely friendship with a black bear in the mountains off Highway 348.
Yarbrough grew up taking family camping trips in those mountains and often made day trips to the area for inspiration while writing. Once, driving from Dahlonega to Suches, “coming around one corner, here comes a cub by himself bounding across the road, and then up, up the hill he went.” The encounter, she said, felt like a sign: “I couldn’t imagine my characters and their conversation taking place anywhere else but in that place.”
In Josh Green’s 2023 novel Secrets of Ash, brothers in crisis come together at a North Georgia cabin where they must make peace with each other and their inner demons. Calling the mountains “this rugged, rough, deadly wilderness that I don’t understand at all,” Green told Georgia Public Broadcasting that the region’s foreignness forced the brothers to lean on each other. “I cannot conquer this,” he said, speaking as one of his protagonists. “I am not macho anymore. I am not the dominant male. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m willing to risk everything just to try to save my kid brother.”
Diane Michael Cantor’s When Nighttime Shadows Fall (2017) — about a young woman who leaves school to work with pregnant teenagers in the Appalachians — pulls a similar thread. Though the book depicts young women in desperate circumstances, it also portrays the grit and empathy those circumstances necessitate. And nature writer Janisse Ray’s The Woods of Fannin County (2022) follows a brood of eight children who are abandoned in an Appalachian cabin in the 1940s and must learn to fend for themselves in the harsh but beautiful landscape.
Other Georgia writers, like James Dickey in his 1970 masterpiece Deliverance, have emphasized the fear and mortality the mountains elicit. Deliverance follows four Atlanta friends who take a disastrous canoe trip through a cultural and ecological setting that exists without regard for them — apathetic at best and cruel at worst.
Yarbrough suggested that for city dwellers, the region evokes as much paranoia and angst as it does enchantment because “it’s not familiar — you can’t predict and you can’t control [it].”
“Sometimes,” she added, “you’ve just got to be afraid out there.”
That sense of fear may be one reason why thriller writer Karin Slaughter writes from her family cabin in Blue Ridge. Though most of Slaughter’s books take place in Atlanta or South Georgia, her 2024 novel This Is Why We Lied sends her detective Will Trent to solve a murder in a North Georgia lodge.
Hank Early’s Earl Marcus trilogy — Heaven’s Crooked Finger (2017), In the Valley of the Devil (2018) and Echoes of the Fall (2019) — follows a private detective who returns to North Georgia after years away, only to find himself embroiled in mysteries driven by local religious fanaticism. Phillip DePoy’s Fever Devilin books turn their attention to Appalachia’s legends and superstitions, starting with 2003’s The Devil’s Hearth. And beginning with Bull Mountain (2016), Brian Panowich’s Bull Mountain thrillers document the efforts of Clayton Burroughs, a North Georgia sheriff from a family of criminals, to keep the peace on the mountain he calls home.
Yet the occasionally harsh and terrifying landscape is also perfect for love stories, like Jeffrey Stepakoff’s World War II romance Fireworks Over Toccoa (2010), a love triangle between a young married woman, her soldier husband and an Italian immigrant.
The books inspired by the region are as varied as the region itself: beautiful and treacherous, harsh and plentiful, ordered and wild. Together, they paint a portrait of a culture and landscape that is distinct and impossible to forget.
“It is kind of its own character, isn’t it?” Yarbrough mused.
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Rachel Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and an MA from the University College Dublin, both in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.
