America’s heartland is celebrated and ignored on the coasts. Many folks in the expansive, vaguely defined Midwest labor (or bristle) under the shadow of inferiority to elsewhere and have also nurtured the darker strain explored in The Haunt of Home. Although awkwardly titled and rambling, Zachary Michael Jack’s book identifies a Midwest Gothic style in art and life, famously exemplified by Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic. That was one unhappy farm couple and the author—a North Central College English professor who grew up on a Midwest farm—explores the “rural ghetto” of our time in towns with shrinking populations yet a determination to soldier on. He identifies fatalism as the strength and limitation of Midwesterners, recalls his family’s experience on land that could no longer support them and makes many literary references. As Charles Dickens described it in his American travelogues, Southern Illinois sounds like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s accursed New England towns.
