la fille noire + the bad boy: a Black American Southern Gothic Nightmare (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798234117359)

A Black American Southern Gothic nightmare where grief, spectacle, and survival collide after a lynching postcard brings a fractured family face-to-face with the machinery that turns Black death into public entertainment.

It's April 1910 in a windswept Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. Black men are turning up dead, a local photographer is selling the violence as souvenir postcards, and a suspicious explosion at Victor Monahan's cotton gin pulls Travis Nelson back to the family he left behind.

At home, Travis finds his wife, Everly, holding together a house already haunted by grief, suspicion, desire, and survival after the death of their daughter, Carrie. But the Nelsons are not merely victims of the county's violence; they are a family fighting to control the story of who they are before the world turns them into evidence, entertainment, warning, or myth.

Loosely inspired by the 1911 lynching of L. D. and Laura Nelson, la fille noire + the bad boy is part mystery, part fever dream, and part historical reckoning. Written as a formally ambitious ensemble play, it examines Black survival, family mythology, American spectacle, and who gets to control the story after violence has already been made public.