8/28/26
On Wednesday — two days ago — I said here in this space “Well, it’s been a full week since the last HWA controversy, which happened a full week after the previous, which happened a full week after the one before that, and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby.”
Last night, as it turns out, a new HWA controversy kicked off, and this one has some weird vibes to it. The kind of vibes that surrounded people I used to work for for a brief time in my youth. It’s not entirely unlike that part of The Sopranos when Tony’s crew absorbs David’s sporting goods store.
You can read the statement here. And I encourage you to do so. It took courage for Amanda and K.J. to step forward.
And I speak from thirty years of experience when I tell you that I know what the effort was like for Laurel to assist them. Sometimes the job is being strong for those who can’t. But more times than not, it’s simply lending others our strength until they are confident enough to see and believe in their own strength.
~
Got stood up by not one, but two contractors yesterday. But the day wasn’t a total loss. Made three trips to the landfill, unloaded one truckload of me and Mary’s stuff, went back out and bought new shelves and a desk for Mary’s new office, stopped by the post office to introduce myself and inform them we’ll be living here permanently hopefully by November and filled them in on my postal requirements, visited my grandma at the retirement community, and helped my 80-year old Uncle Paul and a few neighbors guide a cow that had gotten through the fence back into the pasture, and then fixed the fence line.
This morning, I sat outside with a book and a coffee, and watched the fog roll over the hills in a way that only happens here in West Virginia, and listened to the sounds of absolutely nothing but nature, and felt my blood pressure drop significantly, and a heaviness leave my chest.
Retirement is gonna be good.
~
Women In Horror Year: Day 113
Dark Cloud on Naked Creek by Cindy O’Quinn
After a patient under the care of Afton Sullivan, a nurse at a men’s prison, dies under mysterious circumstances, she blames herself for the prisoner’s death. It isn’t the first time strange things have happened with her patients, and Afton fears it won’t be the last.
Thus begins an odyssey of discovery for Afton, as she ventures into the depths of Appalachia to dig into her family’s history and learn the truth about herself and the cunning folk of the mountain that she’s kin to.
Is she killing people, or does something much darker lurk in the hills and hollers of West Virginia?
Billed as southern gothic, Cindy O’Quinn’s Dark Cloud on Naked Creek calls to mind the works of horror authors we don’t talk about nearly enough anymore — folks like Jack Cady and Fred Chappell and particularly Manly Wade Wellman. (Indeed, Millennial and Gen Z readers probably only know Manly Wade Wellman as the weird hillbilly magus who shows up around the campfire in the occasional Midnight Pals episode, and who the Midnight Pals version of Brian Keene fanboys over). It’s steeped in the same Appalachian folklore as the works of Ronald Kelly, but while Ron’s voice has a pulp sensibility, Cindy approaches those tropes with a more literary style.
And there’s the thing. Yes, this is southern gothic, but it’s also very much folk horror. The second half of the novel delves deep into the lore of the “cunning folk” (known by different things depending on what part of Appalachia you are in — we personally always knew them as “Powwow Doctors”), the faith healers and rustic, rural magicians that populate the Appalachian territory to this day in 2026 (but are getting harder to find, unless you count the nitwits who watch a video about it on TikTok and buy an incomplete bootleg of The Long Lost Friend, then declare themselves a practitioner, too).
It’s a scary and overwhelmingly emotional read, with surprises and secrets that will leave the reader guessing and gasping. Will surely appeal to fans of the authors mentioned above, or to my own Dark Hollow.
Dark Cloud on Naked Creek is available in paperback and eBook from Brigids Gate Press.
