The stories in Faulkner's The Hamlet form a cycle of tales dealing with the Sartoris and Snopes families, tracing their intertwinings and degenerations from the time of Abner Snopes to the early twentieth century.

Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) is a novel of irrationality and violence that has been criticized for exploiting the violence that "Barn Burning" seems to condemn. Written as a potboiler, Sanctuary will also give a sense of Faulkner's more commercial side.

Like Faulkner, H. P. Lovecraft was an agrarian anti-modernist who took a keen and almost obsessive interest in the phenomenon of degeneration. Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth" (1936) is a story of inbreeding, isolation, and violence in a small New England town. Lovecraft's "Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Dunwich Horror" make use of a fictional

American region, Arkham County, in Massachu-setts, which has many points in common with Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha...