We normally call Southern plantations slave farms because they’re historical places of subjugation and pain. Some don’t realize that (or pretend not to), and actually stage events like weddings in such places, but facts are facts—they’re blood-soaked ground. So how does an author make that setting useful for a sleaze novel? We’ve experienced a few attempts.
Derrick Fairman’s 1962 post-Civil War tale Fancy House Lady is set in fictive Feniman’s Landing, located somewhere on the Mississippi River in a state we later learn is Arkansas. Sara Crenshaw has inherited her family’s broken down estate and decides to renovate rather than sell. That renovation turns out to be for naught—as the cover reveals—when the dreaded Ku Klux Klan torch the property. That happens in chapter six of sixteen, but close to halfway through by page count. The book would have been much better had that event come as a surprise.
But okay, you go in knowing that, thanks to the cover art. Wrapped around this crucial incident is the tale of smart, beautiful, and stubborn Sara, who opens a casino in her antebellum mansion—as was her right according to the laws of the time—but is singled out by a bunch of pious and pompous lessers, who in Bible-driven hubris believe they have the right to tell everyone around them how to live. You already know they ruin her casino. The rest of the story is about if, how, and what form her vengeance will take.
Though Fancy House Lady is merely lightweight sleaze, it’s pretty well written, and lays bare ugly truths that have always existed in most cultures. It’s about sex, but it’s also about mob mentality, toxic patriarchy, and the ease with which religion can drive people to embrace hatred yet call it the opposite. Feniman’s Landing is just the made-up town of an inconsequential novel, but it’s a place that, in basic character, could exist anywhere in today’s world. For sleaze, we have to give this one a thumb’s up.
