Florida Gothic: Why My stories always smell like rain, smoke, and saltwater
Most people don’t think of Florida when they think of gothic stories.
They picture crumbling castles, fog-covered moors, old cemeteries buried beneath dead leaves. They think of cold places. Quiet places. Places where the dark feels obvious.
But Florida? Florida hides it differently.
The darkness here lives beneath neon signs and thunderstorms. Beneath tourist beaches and crowded highways. It lingers in the humidity thick enough to cling to your skin, in roads that disappear into cypress trees, in the strange stillness that settles right before a storm breaks open over the Gulf.
There’s something unsettling about a place that looks alive all the time. And I think that’s why I keep writing it. Because Florida doesn’t feel dead. It feels hungry.
Growing up around the Gulf Coast, storms became part of life. Not just weather, but atmosphere. The sky going green-gray before rain. Power lines humming in heavy air. The smell of wet pavement mixing with saltwater and heat. Thunder rattling windows while streetlights reflected gold across flooded roads.
Even now, those things find their way into everything I write.
Where the Roses Don’t Grow could never exist anywhere else. Tampa’s neon glow, late-night traffic, humid air, abandoned industrial stretches, and coastal storms are woven into the bones of that story. The city itself became part of the atmosphere. Part of the tension.
And honestly? Florida already feels supernatural half the time.
There’s something eerie about standing outside at midnight while a storm rolls in off the water, the air so heavy it feels charged with something alive. It’s the perfect setting for ghost stories, ritual magic, things buried beneath old towns, and people trying to survive things larger than themselves.
That feeling carries into Echoes in Silence too, though in a different way. That story leans harder into psychological horror and emotional hauntings, but the setting still matters. Tampa at night becomes all reflections and shadows, grief lingering in the air like humidity before rain.
Even Sweetwater Bay, my newer project, carries that same heartbeat beneath it all. Storm-soaked streets. Lantern festivals near the water. Magic humming beneath small-town charm. Wards buried beneath old buildings. A town trying very hard not to look haunted.
I think that’s what Florida Gothic means to me. Not darkness that announces itself loudly. But darkness hidden beneath warmth. Beauty hiding teeth. Places that feel alive enough to swallow you whole if you aren’t careful.
That atmosphere shapes every part of my writing. It influences the weather, the pacing, the tension, even the way my characters fall in love. My stories are emotional, messy, intimate things, and Florida feels like the perfect backdrop for that kind of chaos. Everything here feels heightened somehow. The heat. The storms. The emotions. The danger.
Nothing stays buried for long here. And maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it. Because Florida understands haunting better than people give it credit for. Not the old graveyard kind. The living kind.