Aquatic Southern Gothic

Erin McCoy’s debut novel draws out the uncanny nature of environmental histories of the American South.

By Caroline HovanecMay 14, 2026

• SF

• Environment

ALL ACROSS THE United States, beneath lakes and reservoirs, there are drowned towns. The great concrete and rock dams of the 20th century were built to generate hydroelectricity or redirect unruly waters, but they also flooded countless valley communities. My mother, who hails from Pickens County, South Carolina, remembers visiting her aunt’s cabin on the Jocassee River as a child. In the 1970s, that cabin, along with most of the trees and buildings in the Jocassee Valley, was razed by Duke Power; what remained was submerged under some 300 feet of water. The 1972 film Deliverance features the Jocassee Dam under construction in its opening shots, as a character in voice-over mourns the impending loss of “just about the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, un-fucked-up river in the South.” Today, divers in Lake Jocassee can still glimpse what was left behind: the old post office, the Attakulla Lodge, the stone columns of a summer camp, gravestones from the Baptist church.

But what if one of those drowned towns didn’t actually drown? What if the people stayed in the valley, stubbornly going about their lives, even as the waters rose around them? That is the premise of Underlake (2026), the fairy tale–like debut novel from Erin L. McCoy. Underlake begins with Otta, a grad-school dropout and commercial diver, returning to her childhood home somewhere in the American South. Otta has come back to care for her aging mother and recover from a traumatic dive. She soon meets a strange woman, May, who asks for her help. May wants to search for her daughter, who she claims has gone missing under the lake.

The lake was created in 1979, when Paintsville, so named for the paint factory at its heart, was dammed. Promises were made about recreation opportunities and tourist dollars. But “the year after the valley flooded, the state health department detected dangerous levels of lead in the lakewater”—remnants of the leaded paint manufactured in the factory—“and forbade anyone from swimming, boating, or eating the fish.” What’s left is a sign reading “WARNING: TOXIC,” a bait shop that never opened, and, beneath the water’s shimmering surface, a church, grocery store, pharmacy, factory, and houses, all outfitted against the water, with moon pools for lake access and air bubbles within. Inside these bubbles are pale, ghostly, still living people.

Otta and May are gothic doubles, and they narrate the histories of their parallel lives in alternating chapters. Otta and her sister Allie grow up in Paintsville’s neighboring town of Steels, children of the disgraced Eugenia Coates, who once stole money from the church collection. May, meanwhile, grows up in the Chimneys, a miniature underwater theocracy in which her status as bastard and orphan relegates her to the lowest of “fates”—a word denoting the Chimneys’ strict caste system. While a young Otta dreams of the sea and goes to college to study marine biology, a young May begins sneaking visits to the Overlake, a forbidden place believed by all other residents of the Chimneys to have been destroyed. Each leaves home, a misfit seeking what she can only find elsewhere, and each is compelled to return.

McCoy’s Southern Gothic sensibility is evident not just in her trope of doubling but also in her world-building. The Underlake is a utopia gone wrong. We learn that it originated with the “People’s Council” (“A Worker-Owned Factory of the Future,” reads its brochure). The council occupied the shut-down paint factory and commandeered its tools and supplies to build batteries, outfit an airflow system, and waterproof the town’s buildings. Aided by a physics teacher with Jacques Cousteau–ian dreams—“it come to me, at some point, that underwater living made a lot more sense than space living”—the People’s Council and its neighbors survive the flood. But years of isolation, high pressure, and scant resources have taken their toll. The Underlake has dissolved into a sequence of half-mad cults, which Otta and May encounter one by one as they dive deeper and deeper. There is the church, preaching that “everything living on the surface of the Earth had been in His wrath sliced down” and only the righteous of the Underlake were spared; the grocery store, where a king of preservation sits on a throne of aluminum cans; the mansion, where a sisterhood of prophetesses smoke pondweed to experience mystical visions; and the Factory of the Future itself, where a former Paintsville scion lives in a museum of taxidermized animal heads and old family photographs, hoarding fresh water for himself and his chosen few.

The gothic is always about repression, about (to quote Allan Lloyd-Smith) “the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit, will not or dare not tell itself.” For the Southern Gothic, that “buried secret” is usually racial violence: the specters of slavery, lynchings, and Indigenous dispossession. Yet if Underlake is interested in these matters, they are buried far indeed. There are a couple of passing remarks about the Indigenous people who settled the land around Paintsville long before white people arrived, and the preacher of the Chimneys calls his flock “white and delightsome,” in contrast to the people of the Overlake, who were punished for “mixing with His unchosen people.” These intimations of stolen land and racial exclusion remain diffuse, remote.

What Underlake is indisputably interested in is drawing out the gothic nature of Southern environmental histories. Invisible, silent threats to the environment—toxins in the serene waters, the ebbing-away of the aquifer below—are a palpable presence in Underlake. The Chimneys’ babies raised on lake water sicken and die, and not even the preacher can explain why. Farther down, Underlake leaders begin rationing medicine and clean aquifer water, drawing lines between the deserving and the undeserving. Between dives, Otta dreams of a friend lost to the ocean while the pair were working on an oil rig. It was a deal with the devil to pay the bills, and it leaves her with an unforgivable debt. McCoy clearly loves the poetics of water and wilderness—“light blued in” after a dive; “trunks of trees scrawled up the air and mustered into dark, moiling leaves” before the eyes of a character who has, up to that point, only ever seen pictures of the woods in moldy books. But there is also a persistent undercurrent of pollution and depletion.

When I began Underlake, I thought that perhaps the dissident district under the water would be a more communal foil for the world above, the world that dammed the river with its misguided Promethean attempts to reshape the environment for the convenience of humans. I thought these would be pockets for alternative ways of organizing social life. And they are, but in a bleaker, more dystopian sense than I had anticipated. At one point, Otta and May encounter an underwater garden, complete with begonias, rosemary, and sapling trees, all made entirely of fabric and plastic. The project of underwater living, framed as an engineering marvel that would be groundbreaking if it were not a secret, comes to seem just as Promethean and misguided as the dam itself.

The mid-20th century is sometimes seen as a golden age of techno-scientific megaprojects, from dams that rewrote the hydrology of a nation to rockets orbiting the earth and landing on the moon. Anthropocene theorists refer to it as the “Great Acceleration,” not just an era of ambitious engineering but also the turning point for our present biodiversity crash and climate breakdown. Today, the ambition of environmentalists is to pump the brakes, to undo much of what was done then. In Florida, where I live, residents are demanding the restoration of the Ocklawaha River. Its flow was cut off by the Rodman Dam, constructed in the 1960s as part of an enormous, never-finished project to build a canal for barges all the way across the state. As local reporter Max Chesnes explains, “Human engineering, then spurred by the promise of economic growth, submerged more than 20 freshwater springs and cut off miles of natural river channel.”

This year, it appeared that the Florida Legislature would have the votes needed to pass a bill requiring that the dam be removed. But it never came to the floor. A group called Save Rodman Reservoir, which wants to keep the dam for bass fishing and the outdoor recreation economy, seems to have caught the ear of the Florida Senate president. Those who live downstream, including wildlife such as manatees and fish who could use the restored river and springs in the absence of the dam, are out of luck, at least for now.

Chesnes reports that, at periodic intervals, the State of Florida must drain the Rodman Reservoir to remove overgrowths of aquatic plants. In those moments, Floridians can catch a prefigurative glimpse of a restored Ocklawaha River. As the waters subside, a “ghost forest” emerges, drowned, bald cypress trees raising their heads once again. The image reminds me of Underlake and makes me think that there is good ecological reason to unbury some of our ghosts and let them come up again for a breath of air.