In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says this about the use of violence, “With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (113). As a fiction writer, one of the questions I struggle with is the justifiability of an overtly violent landscape. In my critical introduction, I will explore how the writers Christopher Coake, Monica Drake, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Benjamin Percy leverage violence through the symbolism of architectural and natural structures—e.g. buildings and caves—in order to reveal something essential about their characters and the larger world. I will also discuss how I strive to use architectural and natural structures in my own story collection to say something essential about characters navigating a landscape fraught with violence and loss.