Blackwood

The small town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, but now seems stuck in a black-and-white photograph from days gone by. Unknowing, the town and its people are about to come alive again, awakening to nightmares, as ghostly whispers have begun to fill the night from the kudzu-covered valley that sits on the edge of town.

When a vagabond family appears on the outskirts, when twin boys and a woman go missing, disappearing beneath the vines, a man with his own twisted past struggles to untangle the secrets in the midst of the town trauma. This is a landscape of fear and ghosts, of regret and violence. It is a landscape transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding terrible secrets deeper still. Blackwood is the evil in the woods, the wickedness that lurks in all of us.

‘Blackwood has a creeping menace to it that grabs you from the beginning and doesn’t let up.’ - The Times

‘Smith is emerging as one of the great chroniclers of America’s dispossessed’ - Mail on Sunday

‘Smith depicts a steamy American South redolent of lawless menace in sparse, simple, lyrical prose. He has produced a taut thriller that lays bare the legacy that violence leaves behind it, as it builds relentlessly to a dramatic climax. You will not be disappointed’ - Daily Mail on Desperation Road

‘Unsettling, heartbreaking, and frequently astonishing, this Southern gothic never runs out of revelations… A gleaming, dark masterpiece by one of Southern fiction’s leading voices’ - Kirkus

‘Michael Farris Smith’s outstanding new novel, Blackwood, makes a strong case for Mississippi to be considered the most disturbing state in America, if not the world’ - Strong Words