2026
Southern Gothic Authors Selected Bibliography
Selected Bibliography
Books By Festival Authors
Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell
A horror and dark fantasy short story collection featuring six interconnected tales set against grim Southern and working-class landscapes, exploring the boundaries between the known world and Hell through supernatural horror and psychological dread.
Learn More
Monsterland / North American Lake Monsters: Stories
Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, this collection blends Southern Gothic horror, fantasy, and literary fiction to examine working-class Southerners confronting monsters both literal and metaphorical.
Learn More
The Strange
A space western set on an alternate 1930s Mars, following a young woman seeking vengeance after her family is attacked, blending science fiction, western, and horror elements in a dangerous frontier colony.
Learn More
Cathedral of the Drowned
Part of the Lunar Gothic trilogy, this novella continues a shared world of cosmic horror, pulp adventure, and dark fantasy.
Learn More
Devil Inside
A man back from the dead meets a woman from somewhere even worse in a new horrormance about love, possession, and just a little murder.
Learn More
Bodies of Work
A murderous artist is haunted by the spirits of those he has killed in a surreal and chilling supernatural revenge novella.
Learn More
Acquired taste
A short story collection that moves from department store Santas to ghost boyfriends, small-town Chesapeake fears, parenthood, addiction, political division, and the claustrophobia of the pandemic.
Learn More
Shiny Happy People
A genre-bending young adult novel set in a struggling Southern small town, shining a light on the terrors of the opioid epidemic through a mysterious new drug and its haunting side effects.
Learn More
Stay On The Line
After a hurricane devastates a small Southern coastal town, survivors gather around a long out-of-service payphone hoping to speak with lost loved ones, only for it to begin ringing on its own.
Learn More
Kill Your Darling
A somber literary thriller about a father whose son was murdered decades ago and whose search for closure draws the killer out of hiding.
Learn More
What Kind Of Mother
A supernatural horror and domestic suspense novel exploring parental grief and devotion through a dark Southern Gothic lens rooted in rural Southern life.
Learn More
The Hollow Kind
An epic horror novel about a woman who flees an abusive marriage only to discover that her inherited family estate in Georgia is haunted by an ancient, hungry evil.
Learn More
The Boatman’s Daughter
Set in the dark bayous of the South, this supernatural thriller centers on a woman caught between human and mystical forces as she tries to protect a secret child.
Learn More
In the Valley Of the Sun
A western horror hybrid set in 1980s Texas, following a man who becomes a monster and is pursued by a grizzled Texas Ranger.
Learn More
Hellions Stories
An electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, moving from the occult to the comic and from the horrific to the wondrous.
Learn More
The Wilds
A debut collection of genre-bending short stories that blend Southern Gothic, science fiction, and fairy-tale elements to explore human vulnerability through bizarre and poignant scenarios.
Learn More
Beneath a Fallen Sky
Set in northeast Alabama during the passage of Halley's Comet in 1910, this atmospheric historical novel follows four ordinary people who believe the world may be ending.
Learn More
Sing Down The Moon
Set on a remote Georgia barrier island steeped in Southern folklore and family inheritance, this novel follows sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye as she struggles against a haunting legacy.
Learn More
The Cicada Tree
A Southern Gothic novel set in 1956 Georgia, following young piano prodigy Analeise Newell as racial tensions, family secrets, and supernatural events erupt alongside a massive cicada brood.
Learn More
Those We Thought We Knew
A novel about racism, history, and community secrets in a small North Carolina mountain town, forcing a community to confront its past and present prejudices.
Learn More
When These Mountains Burn
Set in the fire-ravaged mountains of North Carolina during the opioid epidemic, following a father, an addict, and a DEA agent whose lives intersect around addiction, trafficking, and loss.
Learn More
The Line That Held Us
A story of friendship and family balanced between destruction and redemption, where the only hope is to hold tight to the people you love.
Learn More
The Weight of This World
A dark Appalachian noir about two friends in rural North Carolina whose lives are upended after they find drugs and cash from a dead dealer.
Learn More
Where All Light Tends to Go
A country-noir story of a young man seeking redemption, a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and the inspiration for the film Devil's Peak.
Learn More
People Like Us
A novel following two Black writers trying to find peace and belonging in a world riven with gun violence, as their storylines merge through dark humor, menace, and endurance.
Learn More
Hell of a Book
A National Book Award-winning novel intertwining a Black author on a surreal book tour with the coming-of-age story of a young Black boy, exploring racism, violence, and identity in America.
Learn More
The Crossing
When a deadly pandemic spreads across the globe, two siblings face the ultimate choice: stay and die, or run and survive.
Learn More
The Wonder of All Things
A poignant novel about a young girl who develops the ability to heal others after a plane crash, and whose gift threatens her own health and life.
Learn More
The Returned
A New York Times bestseller about deceased loved ones mysteriously returning to life, focused on an elderly couple whose long-dead son reappears on their doorstep.
Learn More
Worry Box
A family with a foster daughter who suffers from disturbing intrusive thoughts moves into a house with issues of its own.
Learn More
Daytide
A dark fantasy and horror novel described as Black Metal Wizard of Oz, in which humanity suffers from a psychological pandemic of unknown origin.
Learn More
Shitshow
A horror-comedy novella blending gross-out humor with a poignant exploration of dementia and family, as a Texan latrine technician takes on a hellish dark carnival.
Learn More
The Redemption of Morgan Bright
A horror novel about a woman who checks herself into an asylum to solve her sister's murder, only to risk losing her own identity and mind.
Learn More
Stringers
A bromantic space-opera adventure in which a man with strange stores of random knowledge is abducted by an alien bounty hunter seeking inter-dimensional secrets.
Learn More
The Phlebotomist
In a near-future society segregated by blood type and mandatory blood draws, government phlebotomist Willa Wallace witnesses an event that makes her question everything.
Learn More
The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe
A work of literary scholarship exploring Poe's enduring cultural life, influence, and afterlives across American literature and popular imagination.
Learn More
The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City
A study of Edgar Allan Poe and urban life, tracing how the city shaped Poe's work and how Poe helped imagine modern literary urban experience.
Learn More
This B Just Won’t Die!
A feminist slasher novel following an aging scream queen, a horror convention circuit, and a stalker copying her old films.
Learn More
Her Wicked Roots
A Gothic retelling of Rappaccini's Daughter set in Victorian England, blending folk horror, poisonous beauty, and psychological dread.
Learn More
Cicada
A Southern Gothic-tinged horror novella about a young woman trapped in a small town hosting a deadly cicada film festival.
Learn More
On Sundays She Picked Flowers
A lyrical Southern Gothic novel about a woman who escapes an abusive childhood and builds a secluded life in haunted Georgia woods, until a mysterious arrival forces her to confront what she left behind.
Learn More
Dollface
A horror novel described as Barbie meets Scream, featuring a horror author drawn into a slasher plot targeting suburban PTA moms.
Learn More
Another Fine Mess
A Southern horror-mystery novel and the second Bless Your Heart book, following the Evans women in southeast Texas.
Learn More
Bless Your Heart
A Southern Gothic mystery-horror novel about generations of women running a funeral parlor in Southeast Texas while fighting vampires returned to town.
Learn More
Cold Snap
A horror novella about a grieving mother who takes her son to a remote cabin for Christmas and is tormented by strange noises and a sinister figure in the woods.
Learn More
Nightjars
A psychological horror thriller about a man haunted by his serial killer father's legacy and implicated in new murders that force him toward an ancient Appalachian secret.
Learn More
The October Film Haunt
A meta-horror novel about a haunted cult film and the woman reluctantly pulled into its sequel, examining fandom, viral trends, and the line between fiction and reality.
Learn More
The Inconsolables
A collection of literary horror stories about characters confronting personal desires and supernatural terrors in the cracks between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Learn More
The Shop on Royal Street
Part of the Royal Street paranormal mystery series, following Nola Trenholm as she renovates haunted New Orleans houses while dealing with ghosts and family secrets.
Learn More
The House on Tradd Street
The first Tradd Street mystery, following psychic realtor Melanie Middleton as she encounters ghosts and historical secrets in old Charleston houses.
Learn More