Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
by Elisabeth Graves
"[this] Florida native breathes life into all her characters — dead or alive." -St. Augustine Record
Lucy Fowler plans to spend winter break on an island off the coast of Florida, to finish writing her thesis. She needs one last interview with an elderly midwife. Lucy almost cancels the trip after she's brutally assaulted on campus. But in the end she goes, hoping work will be therapeutic.
On remote, isolated Ibo Key, Lucy learns midwife Esther Day is now confined to a psychiatric ward. She also learns that there was once a thriving black community, Revelation, on the island. Its residents all vanished one night long ago. Lucy decides to write about the ghost town, but no one will talk about what happened. Eventually, she uncovers the terrible story behind the town's destruction. Esther's rival, Soulange, once owned a mysterious book . . . a centuries old grimoire revealing the arcana of Obeah. An odd little man tells Lucy the island is cursed. That every man, woman, and child on it will soon die. And she begins to see glimpses of the past.
But by then she's stranded, trapped by a killer hurricane. To escape she must face her own connection to both the victims and perpetrators of a long-ago massacre . . . a crime so monstrous it invites the arrival of an evil old as time.
Devil's Key was originally published by Egmont Boker, Oslo, in 1999 as Svart Frikt. This Northampton House Press trade paperback edition is the first in the English language. Click image to order!
"One of those 'can't stop reading' types of books…This novel will remain in your memory for a long time." – Patrick D. Smith, author of FOREVER ISLAND
"Not a book to curl up with late at night." - Edward Falco
"This Panhandle is deliciously evil, the source of nightmares and zombies." - Florida Times-Union
In the Land of Sunshine, do the dead come back? And who's in charge of the travel arrangements? According to the tourist advertisements, the whole state is made up of beaches and theme parks and racetracks and shopping malls. But if you leave the interstate behind, here and there a bit of the Old Florida survives. In thick palmetto scrub and pine woods, beneath dark, fast-flowing rivers, hidden in long-suppressed family secrets, kept alive by tradition and superstition…and something even more sinister. After Kay Abbott's husband dies suddenly in Miami, she wants to escape grief and start over. So she packs up and takes her daughter to live in a house inherited from his family, in a small town in the rural Panhandle. But Kay hasn't really left her problems behind. And in Jack's hometown she's inherited new ones: an old house with things to hide, a creepy, lecherous realtor, a wandering little girl, a local witch, and a husband who simply won't stay buried. In Abaton the past is only prologue – and the dead haven't gone far away at all. Orginally published by Penguin/Putnam; republished by Northampton House Press in trade paper and ebook. Click on image to purchase!