Festival of the Rougarou: A Southern Gothic Horror (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798266953116)

When the fog lifts off Bayou Blanc, the pumps thrum like something breathing-and the bell at St. Mary's forgets its numbers. Festival week is coming to Crowley, Louisiana: banners hung, porches scrubbed, money promised. The town means to look respectable. The water remembers otherwise.

Disgraced reporter René Broussard returns home to file a harmless storm piece and leave before anyone speaks his name. Instead he finds clean drag marks on a muddy bank, glass beads salted through the reeds, and a string of knots where no child's hand should have tied it. Colette Boudreaux keeps the schedule tight; Sheriff Guidry keeps the optics tidy; Deputy Bernard keeps seeing what doesn't fit. On Granny Fontenot's porch, a cracked bell gives the only good counsel left.

The rules are old and plain: it counts the knots; a bell rung by hand cuts hunger; paper won't save you. And somewhere between parish law and bayou law, a smooth-voiced developer is selling the town by the acre.

Festival of the Rougarou is a tense, lyrical Southern Gothic thriller about what communities choose to believe-and what the water collects when belief runs out.

Perfect for readers of S.A. Cosby, Jesmyn Ward, T. Kingfisher's folkloric horror, and True Detective (Season 1)-anyone who loves humid dread, working-class resilience, and folklore with teeth.

What you'll find inside

• Bayou fog, failing bells, and knotted string ritual

• A town polishing its smile for tourists while something watches from the water

• Found courage, second chances, and an old debt coming due

• Law as ritual, ritual as law-and which one breaks first

Content notes: suspense and creature peril; off-stage deaths; some profanity; non-graphic forensic detail.

Standalone novel.