Blair Lee Lunn

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

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

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

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

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

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 […]