One angle of what I like about Faulkner books

In addition to their immaculate prose, I like the mythology they build, not only as individual glances into a universe of sin and grandeur, but as a collective history of a place, albeit a fictional one, a world of feeling and reaction to the hellscape of the postbellum south. While his publishing counterparts were discovering psychoanalysis, neuroses, consumerism, and industrial malaise, pathologizing middle class existence, and victimizing themselves on behalf of World Wars I and II, Faulkner chose instead to focus on the least scrutinized, the least diagnosed, and perhaps the most traumatized corners of society, despite his characters being none the wiser to their own mental illness and ideological destruction. One can, from an anachronistic standpoint, identify a collective post-traumatic stress disorder across the south, following the Civil War and failed Reconstruction era. An entire social structure burned to the ground. The poison of slavery's legacy mixed with the horrors of unrestricted warfare left a massive portion, rich and poor, old and young, white and black, ruthlessly alienated from reality, physically and mentally deranged, and without local context, resources, or honor to guide them. These are eminent Modernist subjects of estrangement and psychosis, saturated with catastrophe, total lack of faith. They out-suffer the commercial and manufacturing melancholy sweeping the north all the way to California. And they embody a new kind of disease: poisoned without being aware of it, abject without a knowable alternative, cowed to a sentence of despondency and despair that only leads to deeper darkness, no matter the cure: Faulkner's lore becomes Freud's worst nightmare, and the two drift further apart along the same riveted plane.