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 […]
Read of the Month: “The Walls Are Closing In On Us” by Joshua Trent Brown
June 3, 2026 by Leave a Comment
“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 […]
“Measure of Devotion” by Nell Joslin
November 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In her novel Measure of Devotion (Regal House 2025) Nell Joslin takes readers on an intensely personal, first-person journey of rescue during the American Civil War. With blunt-force realism and eloquent descriptive prose, she brings to life the pervasive brutality and sporadic heroism, as well as deprivations, of the nation’s darkest time: “Their eyes crawled […]
“Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories” by Les Brown
September 30, 2025 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by Jeanne Malmgren If anything is synonymous with Appalachian heritage, it’s the art of storytelling. For generations, highlanders have sat on front porches and under trees, spinning yarns that are sometimes true, sometimes a little “stretched.” When Les Brown was a boy, he listened keenly to the oral history of his forebears—and now, in […]
“Half-Truths” by Carol Baldwin
September 15, 2025 by 1 Comment
Introduction: Carol Baldwin spent eighteen years researching and writing her latest book, Half-Truths (Monarch Educational Services 2025). I can’t even imagine. I spent about six years on my first novel, and that felt like an eternity. But Baldwin seems to love research, an important quality for someone taking on a historical fiction novel set at […]