Ballad of the Sad Cafe: Is there more to this novella than the Southern Gothic grotesqueries?

On one level, Carson McCullers's novella "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" is another in the long line of Southern gothics, its main strength, if you call it that, is the establishment in a very short span of a trio of completely eccenctric almost grotesque characters, or characterizations: Miss Amelia, the litigious and cantankerous owner of the cafe, softened by sudden and unexpected love for - Cousin Lyman, the garrulous hunchback who wanders into the tiny town, impoverished and unknown, and is immediately taken in by the wealthy Amelia; the 3rd? - A's husband, at one time the best-looking and toughest guy in town who fell for her, married her, and was expelled after 10 days - A's strange love life and her sexual predilections all very mysterious to the town, and to us, as nothing is revealed outright but we can "diagnose" her from afar - we are in the POV of the narrator, an unnamed town resident, who sees only the glimpses of Miss A. and hears only the town talk - no privileged info - we're looking into her darkened windows for glimpses of her life. When all's said and done, so to speak - what do we have? Is there more to this story that its evident eccentricity? So far, it seems more like a tale than a moral tale - when the greatest writers present odd, peculiar characters they enable us to see beyond or beneath the eccentricity, to feel pity and terror, or love and relief - as one example think of Richard III or any Dostoyevsky hero. In Sad Cafe, I'm not sure but I think we are too much "outside" of the characters - looking from the street into the darkened windows - which may have something to do with this piece's location on the border between novel (where characters have more chance to unfold and open) and short story, where the establishment of one mood, one type, can often suffice.