Pagan Re-enchantment and Speculative Fiction

In his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, our current Vice President J.D. Vance envisions Appalachia as a blighted social landscape of poverty, violence, drugs, and passive resignation. Vance’s portrayal of the region, while lacking nuance and rehashing tired stereotypes, is part of a literary lineage of disenchantment. Earlier accounts of Appalachia, such as Harry Caudill’s influential Night Comes to the Cumberlands, tell an equally dismal story of Appalachia–its expansive forests clear cut in the late 19th century, its mountains deep-mined in the first half of the twentieth—its people reduced to a backward colony of despondency and perpetual impoverishment.

Meanwhile, the story of Appalachian disenchantment continues. A recent newspaper article reports that there are “hundreds of surface-mined coal sites across Eastern Kentucky that have not been fully reclaimed as quickly as they should have, leaving barren ground and continued potential for environmental problems.” This brings to mind images of the once beautiful mountains reduced to stark moonscapes of ruined rock. Devastating and apocalyptic flooding has resulted. Cancer, poverty, and food deserts have eroded the region’s health through the trifecta of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Meanwhile the plagues of oxycontin and fentanyl continue to ravage Appalachia, eroding civic life and culture. If Appalachia is the picked-over ruin of a capitalist extraction economy, diseased and pock-marked barren ground, what mystery, wonder, or ambience is left?

This spell of disenchantment has been countered in various ways, such as Catherine Marshall’s bestselling 1967 Christian-based novel Christy, in which Christian missionaries try to bring the light of faith, hygiene, and civilization to the mountain people.  

Resisting the story of disenchantment projected onto Appalachia by social elites, and in contrast to the dominant Christian narrative of missionary zeal, newer literary works are weaving a re-enchanted vision of Appalachia with threads drawn from a Paganish sensibility. My presentation will focus on two novels and a serialized horror podcast that utilize literary themes, characters, and plot points rooted in earth-based spirituality, Pagan ontologies, and magic. Just as works of literature and popular culture like The Mists of Avalon, Buffy, and Charmed contributed to the discovery of magic and witchcraft among young people in an earlier generation, new works of speculative fiction imagine an Appalachia where Paganism is at home. This “cultural orientation” as Helen Berger and Douglas Ezzy called it, is contributing to the gradual growth and spread of a new-but-traditional Appalachian Paganism, a nature spirituality rooted in a Pagan religious milieu and the folk culture of Appalachian people.

Robert Beatty’s Serafina and the Black Cloak is a novel for young teens set on the Biltmore estate, near Asheville, North Carolina. In the late 1800s, the Vanderbilt family appropriated vast quantities of Appalachian land and built a 250 room manor house to create an idyllic escape and playground for America’s super-wealthy capitalist class. But Serafina, the young protagonist, reveals a hidden world of mystery in the woods where fey shape-shifting beings still dwell. It is a story of an Appalachian magic that crosses, blurs, and transgresses boundaries of class, gender, family, and the wild.

Alex Bledsoe’s The Hum and the Shiver, is set in the Appalachian mountains in and around Gatlinburg, TN and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Deep in the mountains dwells a clan of reclusive hillbillies with deep attunement to the natural world and its magic, descendants of the fey Tuatha de Danaan of Irish legend. Here again are themes of Appalachia as a place of natural but hidden magic. The novel reclaims the hillbilly stereotype, re-enchanting mountain people as keepers of the Old Ways. Bledsoe’s series of books inspired the Pagan rock band Tuatha Dea to compose an entire album, Tufa Tales: Appalachian Fae.

Old Gods of Appalachia is a story-telling podcast that uses folk horror as a mode of re-enchantment. It presents an Appalachia traumatized by the cataclysmic clash with the forces of industry and capitalism. The only thing that stands against this encroaching menace is the tenuous community of Appalachian hedge witches, holding a line against dangerous and destructive forces. The story portrays hedge-witching with careful attention. Showing it to be a difficult and demanding art -- precise, intense, and detailed work that takes years to learn and master. 

All three stories portray Appalachia as a place where magic and nature-oriented spirituality bring power, health, and protection to a vulnerable and beautiful land. The stories show the important role of literature and speculative fiction in re-enchanting both landscape and regional identity in a Pagan mode.

Partial and Preliminary Bibliography

Beatty, Robert. Serafina and the Black Cloak. Disney Hyperion, 2016.

Berger, Helen A., and Douglas Ezzy. “Coming Home to Witchcraft.” In Teenage Witches: Magical Youth and the Search for the Self, 56–85. Rutgers University Press, 2007. 

Bledsoe, Alex. The Hum and the Shiver. Tor Books. 2011 

Collins, Cam and Steve Shell. Old Gods of Appalachia. https://www.oldgodsofappalachia.com/

Cory, Jessica and Laura Wright, eds. Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2023.

Estep, Bill. “Surface mine reclamation in Eastern KY ‘alarmingly slow,’ leaving problems in its wake.” The Herald Leader. February 26, 2025, https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article299907679.html

Fehlmann, Meret. “Folk Horror as Re-Enchantment of a Disenchanted World.” In Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment, and Folklore Genres, edited by Nemanja Radulović and Smiljana Đorđević Belić, 237 – 253. Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Arts, 2021.

Harkins, Anthony and Meredith McCarroll. Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. West Virginia University Press, 2019.

Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. HarperCollins, 2016. 

Witt, Joseph D. “The ‘Book of Mamaw’: Religion, Representation, and Hillbilly Elegy.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 118, no. 1 (2020): 135–62.