ABSTRACT Critics have begun the work of untangling the deep yet occulted functioning of fossil fuels in our symbolic cultures. This essay contributes to growing understanding of how narrative forms interact with hydrocarbons by reading Dymphna Cusack’s engagement with coal in her 1953 novel Southern Steel through her use of melodrama. Set in the Australian coalopolis turned steel city of Newcastle, Southern Steel contrasts the lives of those who benefit from the city’s coal-fired industries with the struggles of those who are victimised by them. In this way Cusack dramatises the primal ethical conflict of fossil fuel modernity, between the forces of carbon capitalism and what Bob Johnson calls the ‘fossil unconscious’: our repressed knowledge of hydrocarbons’ earthly origins, elemental power and outsized harms. Drawing on Peter Brooks’ influential reading of melodrama as a ‘piercing of repression’, I argue that in Southern Steel, Cusack harnesses the melodramatic mode to bring the fossil unconscious to the surface of her realism, forcing recognition of carbon capitalism’s multifaceted harms and ethical failings.