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At any rate, I believe I've said here before that a lot of my outside-of-work reading actually gets done via audiobook on my commute, because I don't have the luxury of public transportation to give me a spare half hour to hour every day.
Dairy Queen stood out to me because main character D.J. Schwenk could be living in my own hometown in Illinois (as it is, she's not far off, up in Wisconsin). Her school, her family, and pretty much everything about her story could have been something I experienced or knew someone experienced in my small farm town. I grew up on a farm and though I didn't play football, that feeling of responsibility for the family farm that a farm kid gets really resonated with me.
So go read the book, and notice the voice--she's got such a distinctive voice. Granted, it was filtered to me by the excellent narrator, but I think that the narrator had a lot of good writing to work with.
Notice the setting: it's my experience that contemporary realism doesn't shy away from rural settings (though I think Dairy Queen is unique in setting it in the upper Midwest--I can't think of a single book that's set in Iowa or Illinois farm country, though suggestions are welcome), but what about contemporary fantasy? Mostly, I see urban and suburban settings. There's a reason for this, of course--that's what writers tend to know, because that's where most of the general population lives. But I'd love to find that contemporary rural fantasy that breaks those boundaries, that can mesh small town contemporary life with a fantastic setting without relying too heavily on tropes popular in more medieval rural fantasy.
Can it be done? Has it been done? Recommendations, if so.
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And Fathom is about to get its first draft handed to Liz sometime next week, so I'm afraid not. But um, well. Let's see -- Dreadful Skin is set mostly on the Tennessee river in the 1870s ... and then it wanders out to west Texas. So that one's pretty rural.
And the next one I'm doing for Subterranean will also be quite rural; it's set in Muldraugh, Kentucky right around the turn of the century. It's like you said in your post, writers write about what they know, more or less. And I grew up in the southeast, much of that time spent in rural Florida, rural Texas, and rural Kentucky. So that's where my horror tends to go.
Eden's books are all set in Chattanooga, though. It's a small city in the middle of nowhere, sort of, but it's not quite rural either. But as Charles DeLint pointed out in his review of 4&20 (which frankly made me squee myself), it's not NYC or LA, and that's something. Right?
:)
Totally want to read/hear DAIRY QUEEN now.
Oh!
I'd think that anything Lovecraftian in its inspiration also has to be rural to some degree--but again, forests rather than farms. That was a huge shift in my understanding of the world when I went to college in the Berkshires: rural doesn't have to be wide open spaces and corn fields.
So (and this is what I should have said before my longer-than-intended comment): what does "rural" mean?
But I also mean the more specific location of the farmland Midwest, mainly because I can't recall one ever being written. The very downright realistic nature of "my folk" seems to cry out against it--I can't tell you how many times my grandma told me I had my head in the clouds or that I had to face reality, etc., and to be a "dreamer" where I'm from means you are a no account lazy good-for-nothing. They'd rather you be a rabid baseball or football fan than daydream about unicorns and dragons.
So I think it might be an interesting setting, one that doesn't have the unique mystique of the South, the forested (and perhaps Fey-filled) landscape of the Northeast, the native history of the Southwest to lean upon. What kind of fantasy story would be set in such a place? Or would it end up being as boring as the bland Swedish-German food I grew up on?
I'm currently working on a rural northwest/lifeguard/werewolf novel that i hope works out... :)
Well, Will Shetterly's Dogland fits the bill, if by "contemporary," you mean "in modern memory." It's not overtly fantastic, but a lot of fantastic things and people make their way into the pages.