Coastal Carolina University professor Daniel Cross Turner has published a book of scholarly essays, "Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture," just released by the Louisiana State University Press. The collection was co-edited with professors Eric Gary Anderson of George Mason University and Taylor Hagood of Florida Atlantic University.

"Undead Souths" examines diverse forms of haunting and horror associated with the American South. The book's explorations of the undead in Southern culture include contemporary depictions such as the vampires in "True Blood" and the zombies in "The Walking Dead," and extend across a variety of media and historical periods, from well-known authors like Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor; to Civil War battlefield daguerreotypes and Confederate ghosts; to the haunted architectures of old New Orleans; to vintage horror films like "White Zombie." As "Undead Souths" reveals, physical manifestations of Southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Cult of the Lost Cause that resurrected the fallen heroes of the Confederacy as secular saints, and mourning rites revived by Native Americans forcibly removed from the American Southeast.

Turner, associate professor of English and founder/faculty adviser for CCU's Southern Studies minor, earned a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His many articles have been published in prominent journals such as Mosaic, Genre, Mississippi Quarterly and Five Points, and he has book chapters published or forthcoming in edited collections from major scholarly presses including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge and Continuum, among numerous other publications.