As the late-and-great Southern writer William Faulkner said in his 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the "only thing worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat," is the "human heart in conflict with itself." In writing the stories in this collection, my goal was to deal with the verities of the human heart. The stories address the universal experiences shared by all women, from childhood to old age, regardless of ethnicity. They are stories about what it means to be a daughter, a mother, a lover, a wife, and a friend but most of all a woman, one who has no choice but to view the world around her from the female perspective.
In the tradition of such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird and Coming of Age in Mississippi, Separate but Equal is a moving universal story, told with honesty and passion, of an era that is a rich, if tragic, portion of American history. Now sixty-years-old and a grandmother, Ruth still remembers Della Gaddy, the beautiful young black woman who strolled down the driveway and into her family's life over fifty years ago. She also remembers what it was like in Fairburn, Georgia in 1957, during a time when black people drank from separate water fountains, attended separate schools and churches, and used separate entranceways to the town's only theatre and doctor's office. She recalls the section of Fairburn everyone called “Lightning,” an area where the town “coloreds” lived and where white people seldom ventured, just as she recalls how the storm clouds of the Civil Rights Movement churned on the horizon in 1957, and the Ku Klux Klan, once thought dormant, had been resurrected to spread fear across the once peaceful Georgia countryside. But Ruth doesn't remember enough. So when she finds a yellowed diary hidden away in a trunk in the attic of the farmhouse where she grew up, a diary that once belonged to Della Gaddy, Ruth turns to her mother in search of answers.
Tammi Jean Cook is sixteen. She is also psychic. So when Tammi Jean hitches a ride from a long-haul trucker named Elvis P. Boone, she knows that when she reaches California she's going to find her daddy . . . even though everyone claims he's dead.As they travel from the kudzu-choked fields of Alabama to the scenic hills of California, Tammi Jean and Elvis become friends as the miles click by on the Kenworth's odometer. They also encounter people like a young woman fleeing for her life; an old Cherokee woman, who warns Tammi Jean of the risks in knowing anyone's destiny; and a man with frightening plans for one innocent child's future.There's also the Man-in-Black. Another long-haul trucker, he too is headed for California; and along the way he challenges Tammi Jean to explore the darker side of being psychic.
There's something terrible in the woods. Susanna Reynolds knows it's there . . . waiting. It watches the house, its measured breathing but a whisper among the thick copse of trees and tangled brush. She can feel its fiery eyes searing her skin whenever she ventures outside, and when she's inside, they pierce the walls, observing her every movement. But no one believes her. Even after what happened last autumn, no one believes her. No one believes her because everyone, including her husband, thinks Susanna Reynolds is insane.
A successful novelist, Ray Winston is proud to be known as the “Master of Fright.” He sees himself as a “dealer” who supplies readers with their drug of choice—sheer terror. And Ray truly understands what makes people cringe at sudden bumps in the night and dread looking under their beds or in their closets. Horror, after all, is his game.Ray is also proud of having overcome years of drug dependency, though his own drug of choice is cocaine. Ray, however, now has writer's block, the deadline for his next novel is fast approaching, his agent and publisher are becoming increasingly impatient, and Ray is feeling pressured. He is desperate for inspiration. When Ray and his family move to a farm in the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia, he believes his creative muse will surely be inspired in such a halcyon setting, far from the rat-race of city life. And Ray does find inspiration, but he also discovers that while he might be a master when it comes to telling a frightening story, he really has no understanding of horror at all—at least not “real” horror.
Ramona Raven is Cherokee and determined to find redemption from a past in which she allowed men to make all the decisions, often with disastrous results. When she dreams of a wild gray stallion, she believes the horse is the key, and find him she must, but in order to do so, she is going to need help. Enter Austin Cahill, a cowboy who is trying to escape memories of the Huntsville Prison Rodeo and another gray stallion, one that destroyed the only thing he had left—his ability to ride any horse breathing. Austin, along with Killian Russell, the teenage runaway he is harboring from the law and passing off as his daughter, join forces with Ramona and embark upon a journey that will change their lives forever. As they travel from the rolling hills of Georgia to the sun-blasted landscape of Utah in search of Ramona's wild horse, these three misfits, each desperately trying to outrun the past, learn to trust, to love, and to believe in the unbelievable. They also learn that the past is exactly that—the past—and all that really matters is today.
There's something terrible in the woods behind the bucolic farm in the North Georgia Mountains. No one knows what it is, but each time the farm changes ownership, tragedy ensues. A local hunter is mauled beyond recognition. A young wife slowly descends into madness. A trained athlete dies a horrifying death. Now the farm has once again changed hands, and Sheriff Randal Hayes, with the help of big-game hunter Byron Wilkes, is determined to find—and to kill—the thing in the woods before it can destroy the new owner and his family. But how do you find something as elusive as the wind? How do you stop the unstoppable?The Dark Woods Trilogy includes The Dark Woods (a novelette), “The Runner” (a story), and Master of Fright (a novelette). While each tale is also sold separately, they have been combined in this volume with but minor revisions from the originals.
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