I liked The Twisted Ones quite a bit, but I think the version of this book I liked the most was the one where I had absolutely no idea what was waiting in the woods. That uncertainty is where T. Kingfisher is at her best. A strange journal. Unsettling figures standing among the trees. A…
Category: Books
13 Southern Horror Book You Need to Read This Spooky Season
The South has always been good at telling ghost stories. Maybe it is the landscape. Miles of pine forest where the road disappears around the next bend. Swamps that seem to swallow everything around them. Old houses sitting quietly beneath live oaks. Small towns where everybody knows everybody—and where everybody seems to know at least…
Southern Reads: The Elementals
There are plenty of horror novels that try to make you afraid of the dark. The Elementals does something much more interesting: it makes broad daylight feel dangerous. Michael McDowell’s 1981 Southern Gothic novel takes the things that should feel familiar and almost comforting about a summer on the Gulf Coast—the beach, the heat, old…
Southern Reads: Wolf Worm
I enjoyed Wolf Worm, but I’m not going to pretend it didn’t test my patience. There were several points while I was reading it — especially when I looked down and realized I was somewhere around page 170 — when I found myself thinking, all right, we need to get going here. Normally, that’s about…
Southern Reads: The Walls Are Closing In On Us.
The Walls Are Closing In On Us feels like a book pulled from the riverbank after a hard rain — muddy, mournful, strange, beautiful, and still carrying the weight of whatever happened upstream. And this is exactly the kind of book that belongs in our Book Club. Join us by heading over to Patreon at…
Southern Reads: Blood and Treasure
Blood and Treasure is the kind of history book that reminds you why some figures never really leave the American imagination. Daniel Boone is one of those names that most people know before they ever really know anything about him. He exists somewhere between schoolbook history, frontier legend, old television reruns, coonskin-cap mythology, and the…
Southern Reads: The Line That Held Us
The Line That Held Us feels dragged out of the mud somewhere deep in the mountains of North Carolina and handed directly to the reader with dirt still on it. And this was an excellent addition to our Book Club—you can join us by heading over to Patreon (The Hidden Pine Lodge). It’s only $4…
Southern Reads: The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster
I know, I know… this book is not a true “Southern” book, but we wanted to mix it up for our Book Club, and Bigfoot, well…Bigfoot is sort of awesome! But, at some point while reading The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, it becomes clear that the book is…
Southern Reads: Demon Copperhead
Some books entertain you. Some books educate you. And some books grab you by the collar and refuse to let you look away. Demon Copperhead is that third kind. Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel drops the reader into Lee County, Virginia — deep in southern Appalachia — and tells the story of Damon Fields,…
Southern Reads: On Trails
For our January 2026 Book Club selection, we read On Trails, a book that quietly reshapes how you understand movement, land, and the invisible systems that guide both. Robert Moor’s On Trails is not a hiking memoir in the traditional sense, nor is it a straight work of natural history. Instead, it is a slow,…