Back yonder in the days of COVID, I ran across a Facebook group called “Dark Sire,” which was, as I recall (and as I understood it), connected to a publishing venture devoted to the Gothic, as that term is variously defined.

During the period that Dark Sire was active and I was following along, an artist named Shaun Power regularly posted electronic images of his paintings. I loved pretty much everything he posted and communicated with him a bit via comments on this piece or that. He was always both generous and appreciative in his responses. His work was most often dark (but rarely monstrous or terrifying) and randomly whimsical. No matter what he posted, far more often than not it resonated with me in some way.

One particular painting appeared in a couple of variations and with a few different names. Here’s the version of it that spoke to me the most:

I don’t remember what title this initially appeared under, but I was immediately taken with it – particular shades of blue that are my favorites, the lonely man with the torch (maybe the torch representing desire, as in “carrying the torch” for somebody or something), the eyes of beasts glowing in the darkness, the human beast that haunts the right side of the image, the haunting silhouette of a woman on the broken branch above the lonely man (possibly what he’s looking for with that torch).

At the time I ran across Shaun’s post of this image, I was somewhere early in the process of drafting Avalon Moon. One character physically absent from the story but still a strong presence is named Kayla Logan Reeves. She’s a painter and an elementary school art teacher. Even though she has disappeared by the time the Avalon Moon story begins, I imagined this as the final canvas she worked on. (You can read about Kayla in her younger days in “Jamboree” and/or listen to the same via her song “Jamboree,” which came before the story.)

Anyway, I was so taken with Shaun Power’s painting that I wrote it into my novel as Kayla’s painting (with a couple of story-related adaptations).

Flash forward to fall 2025 when Madville Publishing emailed to ask if I had any ideas for the cover. I sent a handful of images, one of which was Shaun’s. It’s the one I wanted, and it turned out to be the one Madville liked.

We needed Shaun Power’s permission to use his artwork for my novel’s cover, so I immediately set out (virtually) to track him down. After only a few minutes I learned, sadly, that Shaun had walked on from this world in summer 2024. He was basically the same age I am, only a year or so older, so to learn of his death was made more heartbreaking in that he was so young – as I define young from this vantage point of being sixty-seven years old.

After sitting with that loss for a few minutes, I started looking again, hoping to find next of kin who might be interested in granting permission to use the image. I found his wife, now widowed, and his son, both of whom had points of contact but neither of whom seemed to have a very active online life. I wrote a note to each of them, expressing my condolences for their loss and letting them know of my interest in using one of Shaun’s paintings for my book cover. Given their low-level online activity, I didn’t expect to hear back from either.

But I think it was less that thirty minutes before his son got in touch with me and said that he and his mum thought Shaun would love having his work appear on the cover of Avalon Moon, work he was proud to have shared with Dark Sire. Because Shaun published this image under a couple of different titles, his wife and son asked that we credit it as Shaun’s Strange Land, which is a variation of one title he gave it.

Now the book is a reality, and as I’ve been posting images of it in hopes of garnering preorders (release date is May 19), most everybody who has commented on those posts express some variation of “Wow, what a cover!” I’ve sent copies to Shaun’s family in England, and I hope they’ll be as pleased with the outcome as I am. His son Wayne responded to my note telling him the books were on the way with a note including this: “My mum was only saying, earlier today, that Dad would have been like a kid waiting for Xmas until the book arrived for him to read.”

Recently, I received word that Streets of Nashville was named a 2025 Finalist at BestThrillers.com. Very gratifying! I don’t know if the same might happen to Avalon Moon, but the gracious review below hints that it’s possible (fingers crossed).

Review coming soon from BestThrillers.com:

Gabriel Tanner, editor of a weekly newspaper in the North Carolina mountain town of Runion, expects little excitement from an early March county meeting. Instead, local Spellman Anderson IV explains his controversial plan to establish a wolf sanctuary on Christabel Island, setting off fears of escaped animals, nighttime howling and threats to stock and children.

Meanwhile, a man goes missing and is later found dead in a highland meadow beside an unidentified woman. Soon, another man and woman disappear, and a female deputy is murdered. As the case widens, Gabriel is drawn beyond the normal boundaries of his profession, while Plumer Reeves, a reclusive man known for helping find the missing, begins looking into the death at the request of the dead man’s niece, Livvy Goforth.

Author Michael Amos Cody gives the book a Gothic charge in chapters told from the point of view of Spellman IV’s daughter, Ariel. She discovers a hidden manuscript suggesting that the island may already have a darker history of beastly terror. Cody handles this material with considerable restraint. He does not completely embrace the allure of werewolf fiction, but neither does he confine the book to procedural logic alone. The result is a mystery novel suffused with dark atmosphere and Appalachian memory, one in which profession, landscape and myth continually shape the reader’s understanding of what kind of danger is actually at hand.

Cody is patient without becoming inert, literary without losing narrative grip. AVALON MOON begins in local controversy and expands into something darker, stranger, and more resonant than a standard murder investigation. By grounding suspense in profession, community, and place, then allowing folklore and history to deepen rather than overwhelm the central mystery, Cody has written a thriller of unusual richness.

Gabriel is an effective amateur sleuth because Cody understands how a profession can shape narrative form. Gabriel is not a police investigator, and the novel benefits from that. As an editor, he works by attention, synthesis, and context. He notices the pressure points in a room, the drift of local opinion, the way apparently minor details begin to speak to one another over time. Cody uses journalism here much as another novelist might use police procedure or legal process — as a disciplined way of seeing. Meanwhile, eccentric tracker Plumer Reeves provides the complementary energy the novel needs. Where Gabriel is socially embedded, Plumer is solitary, haunted, and harder to place.

The Bottom Line: With wolves across the river and murder in the high meadow, AVALON MOON knows exactly how to raise the hair on your neck. Move it to the top of your book queue.

I’m thrilled that the great Appalachian fiction writer and poet Ron Rash—author of Serena and The Caretaker—read Avalon Moon and provided a short review, an excerpt of which is on the image above. Here’s his full “blurb”:

In AVALON MOON, Michael Amos Cody has written a story that has the dark and haunted feel of an old-time Appalachian ballad. Literary echoes of writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Brockden Brown add to the novel’s richness and make Avalon Moon an exceptional addition to the genre of Southern Gothic fiction.

I’m also thrilled that Mr. Rash will be joining us here at ETSU on Wednesday, April 22, as the featured writer for our Spring Literary Festival. Y’all come!

In the coming weeks, as we approach the May 19 release date, I’ll be sharing more such blurbs from writers I greatly admire.

Stay Tuned!

Better Fears

O God
it is so easy
to be afraid
to be made afraid.

Demagogues of every sort
have always counted on our fears
to scare us into submission.

Politicians and preachers
commissars and evangelists
make people afraid—
afraid of what will happen to them
afraid of death
and therefore of life
afraid of differences
strangers
joy.

The fearmongers are so successful
because they find in us
such willing subjects.

But the gospel of perfect love
comes to us
to cast out fear—
from our beginning.

Some of us
have never affirmed
our first birth—
have never said “Good!” to our emergence
“Very good!” to our creation.
Be midwife to our self-respect
and mother to our growth.

Perfect love
will cast out fear
and when You are through with us
we will be fearless.
In the mean time
at least help us
to move from petty fears
to better ones;
from fears of hell
to admissions of joylessness;
from quaking before opinions and modes and fashions
to fearing
loss of our integrity
and untruth in our very souls.

We would say “Bravo!”
to
our birth
our re-birth
Your will that created us
our choice to be
and to become

amen.

Better Than Nice and Other Unconventional Prayers by Frederick Ohler. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989. 28-29.

Early in Streets of Nashville, Ezra MacRae is out walking on Music Row late on a Saturday night. He’s a bit drunk, having been out celebrating his first taste of success as a Nashville songwriter. As he moves along the sidewalk, aware of an approaching storm, he complains to the night that Kate Hathaway didn’t come out to share in the celebration. What Ezra says suggests that, from his point of view at least, they’ve had an interesting and complicated relationship since being introduced by Gabriel Tanner, with whom Ezra also has an interesting and complicated relationship.

Throughout the middle sections of the novel, Kate and Ezra meet a few times in the process, Ezra hopes, of mending their relationship, which broke due to some unnamed indiscretion Ezra committed but can’t remember because he was blackout drunk at the time. But when Burl Davies, his publisher, is murdered, Kate calls to talk, perhaps to console him or perhaps just to gossip, and she ends up coming over with groceries to cook for them—more than once. They eat together and enjoy going to bed together, and they seem to enjoy their conversations both in kitchen and bed.

Readers might notice two things about this time of trying to heal a fractured relationship. First, despite what the meals and the sex might suggest, Kate is certainly not the touchy-feely kind. Even in the midst of their sexual and culinary adventures, she remains on guard and unsure about Ezra, and she doesn’t mind telling him so. On the phone before their first meeting after the shooting at Ave Canora, she tells him, “‘I’m not sure we’re friends anymore’” (71).

The other thing readers might notice about these two is that Ezra doesn’t quite know how to behave around her. She’s doing all this very friendly stuff with him—cooking for him, commanding him into bed (she really does, but he isn’t resistant), keeping him company in a dark time (but not such friendly company as she might’ve been). Still, he’s cautious about what to expect from her visits and what he might say to her during her visits.

As a writer, I like Kate. I like her a lot. But I don’t know what to make of her any more than Ezra does. And I’ve known her longer than he has. She’s part of Gabriel’s story in Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press, 2017), in which her character is little different—hard edges intact—from how she came to me in Streets of Nashville. She’s redheaded and a chainsmoker. She’s a hard-nosed front-office person, a gatekeeper, in the Music Row offices of Gabriel’s somewhat shady publisher and producer, for whom she’s still working in Ezra’s story.

The last time Kate appears in Streets of Nashville is the Sunday evening Ezra is attacked by Officer Murdoch Perras. Ezra is managing the kitchen while the meal cooks and Kate showers. Perras appears at the back door and forces his way inside. He wrestles Ezra to the living room floor and is choking him with deadly intent, when Kate comes out of the bathroom with her pepper spray and rescues Ezra. Tough as her exterior is, this traumatizes her so that with very little else to say, she leaves Ezra’s apartment and at that point exits the novel. I thought it only made sense that she would disappear, given the trauma and her tenuous, even somewhat antagonistic relationship with Ezra. Add to this the fact that Ezra is falling for Sally Evans. Knowing that Kate will reappear in the third Ezra MacRae novel, currently titled Antaeus, I wasn’t bothered by her exit.

What didn’t occur to me was that readers might develop a different relationship with Kate. The first indication that this might be the case was when a Goodreads reader posted a four-star review, rounded up from “3.75!” The reader reluctantly gave the novel four stars because she seems to have found it a really good read. She took the novel to task for “completely abandoning a character who cared for and seemed to love the main character, who stood up for him in a climactic fight, and is never heard from again.” Almost a dealbreaker for this reader. She writes, “[H]onestly this was so distracting for me i wanted to rate the book 3 stars but i blasted through this book so that didn’t seem fair.” Fair enough, I think. I appreciate fairness, and if I understand her last phrasing, she enjoyed the novel on the whole to the extent that the “blasted through” bit somewhat made up for Kate’s disappearance.

This wasn’t a one-off complaint.

In the more formalized setting of the North Carolina Literary Review, Andrew K. Clark expressed the same concern, albeit with a little more restraint, thankfully. He writes,

If I have one criticism of the novel it would be that an important character when the novel opens doesn’t figure into the closure the novel offers for other characters, after playing a pivotal role in a particularly traumatic scene. I wanted to know how she dealt with the trauma and her resolution alongside the other characters. (61-62)

Again, fair enough. In my mind, she dealt with the trauma by disappearing from Ezra’s life as she’d disappeared from it at the beginning of the novel due to “some St. Patrick’s Day indiscretion that he couldn’t remember and she couldn’t seem to forget.”

One more. A few days ago, one of my favorite students from the Fall 2025 creative writing class came to interview me for an assignment she had in a Spring 2026 class. After we completed the interview, she told me that she’d read Streets of Nashville once our class together was over. She really liked it, she said. But, like the Goodreads reader and Mr. Clark, she wanted to know what had happened to Kate Hathaway. She was glad to know she wasn’t the only one with that question, and I explained that Kate was so traumatized by the horrific fight in Ezra’s apartment that she removed herself from his life until a later time beyond the end of the novel. My student understood and liked that explanation.

But I was left with the realization that readers can understandably have questions that can be expressed via disappointment. They necessarily don’t have the long-range view of the story and characters that I do, so I should probably keep that in mind going forward. I mean, if I like Kate and have an interest in what happens to her, then I shouldn’t be surprised—in fact, I should be gratified—when readers like her and don’t like to see her leave the story as if forgotten.

Duly noted, y’all.

Charles Dickens recognized the significant danger ignorance poses to our world in A Christmas Carol (1843). In the last moments that Scrooge spends with the Ghost of Christmas Present, he notices something odd–“‘a foot or a claw'”–protruding from beneath the hem of the spirit’s robe. Scrooge asks about it, and the Ghost reveals what the old man has seen a hint of:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

When Scrooge asks, “‘Spirit! Are they yours?'” the Ghost replies,

“They are Man’s. . . . And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware of this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! . . . Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

Reviewing images from 6 January 2021’s attempted overthrow of the U.S. government, I see a couple of Black faces–both male. I see many more white female faces. But of course the vast majority of faces are those of white males, most looking very faux MMA or Duck Dynasty: “Big and dull-featured” men.

Altogether, the hot mess of faces that poured through the streets of DC and invaded the Capitol made up a lava flow of IGNORANCE.

I have no doubt that many of those domestic terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, 6 January 2021, are smart in their way, perhaps even articulate in attempting to defend their beliefs and actions (although their actions on that day are, I believe, indefensible even though our Tiamat has pardoned those charged). But I also have no doubt that, to a man, their ignorance, like that of their figurehead leader, is absolute and devouring.

Absent an education about the world, absent knowledge about that world and the self, absent an awareness of the self and the great streams of life within and beyond, the gaping maw of aggressive, malignant ignorance exhibits a taste for little other than animal sensations. Even as animals ourselves, however, humans have incredible capacities for imagination, empathy, sympathy, sensitivity, and love. Ignorance is neither interested in nor capable of these. It is the worst-case scenario of self-centeredness, arrogance, and narcissism.

One dangerous effect of ignorance is instability. The state of being ignorant is one of being ungrounded, unmoored. No matter how substantial the physicality of ignorant men or women or other, the instability resulting from their ignorance leaves them adrift from truth, reality, discernment, and humanity, causing them to be blown around by any wind that reaches them, to be washed this way or that by any tide or flood or pulled under by any insidious riptide.

When 1/6 attackers attempt to defend their actions by saying they just got caught up in the moment, what they’re really telling us that they admit to a destabilizing ignorance that allowed them to be swept away in the chaos manipulated by their supreme leader. For him and them, ignorance has become a state of being, like the air they breathe, and whether this ignorance is individual or corporate, it is unable to know or recognize itself.

“Lord, save us! We are perishing!”
(Matthew 8:25)