Whispering in the Cypresses
I only just realised that it has been a year to the day since I posted last. I’m the first to admit that I’m a pretty lousy blogger but I’ve been incredibly busy the last year working on my next historical novel as well as writing a new novel under my pseudonym P. J. Thorndyke (check that out here). But Halloween is upon us once more and I have yet another ghostly novella out just in time!
This time I took my cue from Southern Gothic; a genre that has earned increasing attention in the wake of True Detective, the third season of American Horror Story (the one with the witches in New Orleans) and The Walking Dead. It’s a genre we can see in older movies too like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). Originally a literary genre pioneered (however unintentionally) by William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams, Southern Gothic often deals with dysfunctional Southern families, fallen antebellum aristocracy and all things decayed, Gothic and macabre against a backdrop of economic depression and the crumbling plantation houses of the American South. I’m going to do a Southern Gothic post in the next few days but for now, take a look at the cover and blurb of my new release.
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On a bayou in the Mississippi Delta sits the old Richardson plantation; an abandoned relic of the antebellum South, shrouded in ruin and sad memory. Eerie apparitions have been seen in and around the grounds and whispering voices have been heard in the woods. Who is the woman in an antiquated dress who always seems to be watching from the shadows? Who is the bloody man in a plaid shirt who wanders the corridors at night? Three separate stories set in three different eras tell the tale of the Richardson plantation through the eyes of its unwary visitors.
A turn of the century servant who will take any job to support her sickly son, a 1930s pulp writer looking for inspiration in the deep, dark south and a group of 1970s film students hoping to shoot some useable footage during a drug-fuelled summer excursion; these are the ones who will encounter the plantation’s true residents and uncover its tragic history.
Available from
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