“In Broadbent’s latest, a young woman is forced to go where the deputies fear to tread … deep in the swamp to find her lost brother.”
No one blinks an eye when Lila Carson’s young brother Beau disappears. Ten-year-old Beau can’t talk and throws tantrums. He’s just another useless Carson, another one of those kids in a broken down house, its glory long gone after his father died.
The sheriff and his good ol’boy deputies aren’t much help either. They show up and eye up Lila and call her twin brother names. Lila, a closeted bisexual girl in the South, is scared to death now.
Everyone says it like an eleventh commandment: Don’t go in that swamp. Now it’s clear Beau went where he wasn’t supposed to go and disappeared beyond those ancient trees. Even the sheriff’s deputies won’t go back there.
Lila might not have a choice.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Elizabeth Broadbent is one of the freshest voices in horror, specializing in Southern Gothic as well as dystopian speculative fiction. Broadbent is the author of Ink Vine and Ninety-Eight Sabers, and has short fiction gracing the pages of such publications as Ghostlight, Haven Speculative, Tales to Terrify, and The Black Beacon Book of Horror, among others. In Broadbent’s latest, a young woman is forced to go where the deputies fear to tread … deep in the swamp to find her lost brother. Tim McGregor (Eynhallow) says: “Like the dark swamp at its heart, this book melds Southern Gothic with folk horror in a delightful way. A bold, assured narrative voice that will lure readers into its fetid darkness.”, and Clay McLeod Chapman (Wake Up and Open Your Eyes) says: “Elizabeth Broadbent discovers a creek that connects directly to Michael McDowell’s Blackwater mythos, leading readers through this beautiful backwater novella. This missing child manhunt is steeped in so much southern gothic, it feels like Faulkner, O’Connor, and Shepard have all joined the search party.”
Releasing from Raw Dog Screaming Press 3 April 2025, Blood Cypress by Elizabeth Broadbent (part of the Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena, edited by R.J. Joseph) is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA
