This weekend I’m pleased to announce that the anthology featuring a slew of authors from the Atlanta Chapter of the Atlanta Horror Association has been released! Please give a big welcome to Georgia Gothic.
Folks don’t think much when it comes to horror in Georgia. When we’re lucky, they think about a woman who would have been good if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. When we’re less fortunate, they think of banjos and bad canoe trips. This book aims to fix that.
These stories fully inhabit Georgia, from the cities to the swamps, the mountains to the shore, from Buford Highway to the roadside barbecue stand. Within are stories set among the kudzu that is working to reclaim the buildings of times gone by. Follow the hand-scrawled roadside sign for BOILT P-NUTS, and hear the summon of the cicadas towards the fecund rot of the swamp swirled by an ocean breeze.
The Gothic begins with the locus of horror—crumbling castles and soaring cathedrals. In Georgia, the crumbling castle is replaced by the antebellum plantation house with secrets in the attic. The soaring cathedral is replaced by the revival tent and the Sunday potluck. Georgia Gothic explores through a lens of struggles and transgressions that are particularly southern such as slavery, reconstruction, prohibition, and Jim Crow. The Southern façade of perfection holds up politeness as a chief virtue while sheltering ugly truths. Some things just won’t stay buried.
My story, “The Girl at Wahuhi Creek”, features a woman who is living in a hotel after getting evicted. She’s struggling to make sense of her new life and trying to figure out where she goes next. One cold winter evening she sees a little girl playing in the creek in merely a nightgown. She should leave well enough alone, but she simply can’t.
Check out all of the incredible authors who are also included in this anthology! I’m so honored and thrilled to be included alongside them.
Foreword by Gini Koch
“Marthasville” – Benji Carr
“And Dark Confound Us Here” – David Powell
“All Roads Lead To” – Kelley M. Frank
“Dream House” – C.O. Davidson
“The Woods Are All I Need” – Vanessa Reid
“The Heap of Root and Stone” – Kelley M. Frank
“We All Gotta Eat” – Jessica Nettles
“Cicada Tales” – Kitty Sarkozy
“Little Buddy Gus” – Can Wiggins
“The Old Meadow House” – Persephone Justice
“The Dress Begins to Fade” – Peter Adam Salomon
“Love Letters from the Devil’s Beard” – Jessica Ann York
“The Dead Line” – David Powell
“Ghostwriter Wanted” – D.C. Phillips
“MeeMee” – Can Wiggins
“Tommy’s Field” – Nathan McCullough
“The Body Hidin’ Spot” – Jeff Strand
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Cooking Country” – Jamie Grimes, Kitty Sarkozy, and Jessica Ann York
“Ghost Child of the Creek” – Darrell Z. Grizzle
“The Girl at Wahuhi Creek” – Marlena Frank
“Best Friends Forever” – Dawn Major
“Plantation” – Peter Adam Salomon
“Grady’s Plantation” – Tony Sarrecchia
“I Will Not Walk in Darkness” – Jamie Grimes
I have to give a huge thank you to Alex and Vicki (and Peter, of course) for putting this all together, to Lynne for the gorgeous cover, and to Kelley for the amazing interior art.
This is also one of the final projects that Peter Adam Salomon worked on as an editor before he passed away in September. Our Atlanta Chapter was distraught by his unexpected passing. He was an incredible author and poet whose work I both admired and collected. If you have followed my website for a while, you’ve likely seen many books of his that I’ve reviewed, loved, and highly recommended. He gave me the chance to read some of his work before it was published to give him some feedback, and at least one of those stories never made it to publication. I will always miss that I didn’t get the chance to chat with him more during Decatur Book Festival in 2019, and that I’ll never get to read more of his surreal and incredible stories.
This anthology is dedicated to his memory.