What Is AVALON MOON?

Back in the winter, while finalizing and waiting for the 15 April 2025 publication of Streets of Nashville, I finished the first and second drafts of a new novel titled Avalon Moon.

Like my short story collection A Twilight Reel, all of Avalon Moon takes place in the vicinity of my fictional North Carolina mountain town of Runion.

Here’s my elevator pitch:

In AVALON MOON, somebody is killing people—two by two, female and male—in the mountains of western North Carolina, and the local newspaper editor works with a reclusive finder-of-lost-things and two extraordinary young women to discover the killer, unwittingly making themselves potential pairs of targets.

Here’s part of the query letter for the publisher:

AVALON MOON opens in the mountains of western North Carolina on the eve of Winter Storm Ulysses. Before the blizzard begins, a group of local farmers and landowners meet with the county extension agent to discuss concerns that Avalon Orchards—once a thriving, idealistic community established on an island in the French Broad River—is creating a wolf sanctuary. But penned wolves on Avalon’s Christabel Island will soon be the least of the community’s worries.

A local man has gone missing and is soon found dead in a highland meadow, side-by-side with an unknown woman. When a second man—an unsuspecting visitor to the area—goes missing and a female deputy is found dead, Gabriel Tanner, editor of Runion’s weekly newspaper, and Plumer Reeves, a recluse haunted by the disappearance of his wife a few years before, suspect that somebody is hunting in their mountains. Two extraordinary young women, Avalon’s Ariel Anderson and Lonesome Mountain’s Livvy Goforth, join the editor and the recluse to lead the attempt to discover the killer and stop the killings.

Some information you might find interesting:

The year is 2014. I think this is my first time to set a story in the time of cell phones and widespread computer use, so that was different.The newspaper editor, Gabriel Tanner, is one of two first-person narrators in the story. If you read my first novel, Gabriel’s Songbook , then you know Gabriel and his wife Eliza. Gabriel turns fifty-five years old as the story is getting underway.If you read my story “Conversion,” either online at the late great Still: The Journal on in A Twilight Reel, then you’ve met Avalon Moon‘s Livvy Goforth. Livvy is a five-year-old girl in “Conversion.” She’s an intriguing character, I think, who never says a word, but it’s hinted that she has some kind of power that’s part of Appalachian mountain lore. I remember reading for and talking with a book club when A Twilight Reel was just out, and one of the club members asked what happens to Livvy. The question stuck with me, so here she is, now twenty years old and still an intriguing mystery in herself.Plumer Reeves is the “reclusive finder-of-lost-things.” His first name is my father’s and rhymes with rumor, and his last name is my mother’s maiden name.Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), a Philadelphia author that I wrote my dissertation and first book about, makes an appearance via a long lost Avalon manuscript.

Here’s a picture painted by my late friend Don Neblett (1933-2025) that hangs above my desk at home. I don’t know if it could be the cover, but it was inspiring.

I might also add that a submission of the first fifty pages of Avalon Moon was a 2023 Claymore Award Finalist in the Southern Gothic category. (The Claymore is associated with the Killer Nashville International Writer’s Conference.) The Claymore doesn’t offer Appalachian Gothic as a category, which is more accurately what Avalon Moon is.