Title: The Bayou
Author: Arden Powell
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 97 Pages
Category: Southern Gothic, Horror, Fantasy, Historical
Rating: 4 Stars
At a Glance: Arden Powell melds the feral and predatory with the fantastical and dreadful. Their writing is claustrophobic in the best ways, capturing the sultriness of the setting, and that special something for those who dare to be tempted by other people’s nightmares.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Small-town Louisiana, 1935.
When Eugene was twelve, a girl from town disappeared. Everyone said the gators must have got her when she strayed too near the bayou. No foul play, just a terrible accident. But Eugene can’t shake the conviction that Mary Beth’s death had something to do with the man who used to haunt her—the man no one else could see.
Now, nearly two decades later, there are more dangerous things than gators in Chanlarivyè. People are disappearing again, and this time, no one can find the bodies. As the town’s unease grows, charismatic fugitive Johnny Walker arrives on the scene, shedding bullet casings and stolen bank notes in his wake.
He tangles himself up in Eugene’s life and awakens memories Eugene thought he had laid to rest years ago. Memories of the mysterious man who followed Eugene into his dreams, and memories of the bayou—and of the horrifying entity that lurks beneath the water’s surface, slowly seeping into the town like a stain.
Review: The Bayou is the second of Arden Powell’s books I’ve read (back-to-back, I might add), the first being The Faerie Hounds of York, which I loved and would recommend to anyone who likes their fairy tales dark, bittersweet, and with a nonconformist’s brand of romantic ending. With that being said, however, this long novella is nothing short of perfection for lovers of Horror, or, more specifically, the Southern Gothic. It’s a story that exceeds its word count in the best possible way, offering up a much richer, frightening, and emotionally charged story than should be conceivable for its length.
Powell plops readers down in the Louisiana bayou town of Chanlarivyè, circa 1935, where a Bonnie & Clyde-esque couple, who are criming their way across the landscape, settle in to wreak a little havoc. Johnny Walker and Angelique Monnet haven’t met a bank they wouldn’t rob, but they are a mere component of this tale. The true grit of the story, and the protagonist Eugene’s trauma, is what prompted the author to offer Content Warnings for “on-page suicide, child sexual abuse, dubious consent, period-typical homophobia, graphic descriptions of gore and violence, gun violence, and religion,” so please be aware this story doesn’t pull any punches in its depictions.
In short, Eugene is reliving a nightmare, one that he’d suppressed memories of seventeen years ago thanks to the adults in his life drugging him and convincing him he hadn’t seen what he did, in fact, see. The unchallenged piety of the pulpit has everything to do with that, and now Eugene is paying the price for his denial of the horrors perpetrated on his best friend Mary Beth—or misremembering, or blanking out, whatever method he used to preserve a little bit of his sanity and safety—and he’s now paying for that in terrifying ways. Because something in the bayou, something sinister, something vengeful, something unforgiving, is disappearing the people of Chanlarivyè, to the point that the swamp is overtaking the town itself. And it seems the strikingly beautiful Johnny Walker may somehow be connected to Mary Beth’s disappearance nearly two decades before.
When Johnny takes an interest in Eugene is when things begin to unravel, not only in Eugene’s mind and memories but in his intense attraction to Johnny as well. The gangster is so much more than he seems on the surface, and Eugene faces a reckoning that connects the past with the present in some unexpected, frightening, and gut-churningly gruesome ways. I don’t consider myself having a dark side, but I adore authors who don’t shy away from examining the darker side of humanity and human nature in the Horror genre, and Powell does that in The Bayou, with the bonus of a supernatural twist.
Arden Powell melds the feral and predatory with the fantastical and dreadful. Their writing is claustrophobic in the best ways, capturing the sultriness of the setting, and that special something for those who dare to be tempted by other people’s nightmares.
You can buy The Bayou here:
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