Josephine Humphreys anchors her best-selling novels firmly in the South, and scholars identify her interest in place, family, race, and history as Southern concerns; but hers is not the "Christ-haunted" South of Flannery O'Connor, and her characters are more likely to be urban than rural. Mystery and ritual are nevertheless familiar presences in her fiction. In her essay "The Epistle of Paul to Titus: Liars and Evil Beasts" (1990) Humphreys says that the unorthodox quality of her belief keeps her "awake and on the lookout." She associates this anticipatory spirit with an almost pantheistic love of nature and also with her love of the written word, affections shared by many of her characters. Humphreys believes that true fiction is rooted in "the mystery and power" of place, and in the essay "A Disappearing Subject Called the South" (1988), she urges writers to defend this "lifeblood" against the threat of so-called...