An heirloom pocket watch loosely links three novellas together in Green Forest, Red Earth, Blue Sea by Jim Gulledge. Each story captures the distinctive beauty of a different North Carolina community—Saluda, Peachland, and Beaufort. The prologue presents a striking image: a hawk, a rabbit, and a rattlesnake, each “oblivious to all hungers but its own,” […]
Blair Lee Lunn
August 2, 2026 by Leave a Comment
Blair Lee Lunn is a writer and educator from North Carolina and the author of Emergence (Bottlecap Press). Her interests in reading and study include the craft of writing, speculative fiction, and queer and multicultural American literature. Among other places, her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Sun, and The Masters Review Anthology. […]
“Summer State of Mind” by Kristy Woodson Harvey
July 1, 2026 by 2 Comments
In her newest novel, Summer State of Mind, Kristy Woodson Harvey does it yet again—she brings us into a story that we don’t want to leave. But before I go any further, I want to know something. Could this possibly be the beginning, or continuation, of a series? Please, say yes! I am so not […]
Read of the Month: “The Walls Are Closing In On Us” by Joshua Trent Brown
June 3, 2026 by Leave a Comment
What would your life look like if it were played back for you in your final moments, watched from a lofty vantage like heaven, or the more oblique angle of purgatory? Would you see yourself being carried along, pinged from vertex to vertex as the polygon of your life develops? Could you name the forces […]
“Where Dark Things Rise” by Andrew K. Clark
January 11, 2026 by Leave a Comment
In the dusky shadows of 1980’s North Carolina, Andrew K. Clark conjures a novel both haunted and alive in Where Dark Things Rise (Quill & Crow Press, 2025. Two generations past the events of his earlier work, Where Dark Things Grow (Independently Published, August 2024), the world here is darker and more restless, peopled by […]
“These Blue Mountains” by Sarah Loudin Thomas
November 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
If you have never visited Black Mountain, North Carolina, by the time you finish reading Sarah Loudin Thomas’s These Blue Mountains (Bethany House 2025) you will want to pack your bags and go. Fans of Kim Michele Richardson’s The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch, and Annette Clapsaddle’s Even As We […]