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Festival of the Rougarou: A Southern Gothic Horror
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 24 2025
Pages: 388
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.86 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
When the fog lifts off Bayou Blanc, the pumps thrum like something breathing-and the bell at St. Mary's forgets its numbers. Festival week is coming to Crowley, Louisiana: banners hung, porches scrubbed, money promised. The town means to look respectable. The water remembers otherwise.
Disgraced reporter René Broussard returns home to file a harmless storm piece and leave before anyone speaks his name. Instead he finds clean drag marks on a muddy bank, glass beads salted through the reeds, and a string of knots where no child's hand should have tied it. Colette Boudreaux keeps the schedule tight; Sheriff Guidry keeps the optics tidy; Deputy Bernard keeps seeing what doesn't fit. On Granny Fontenot's porch, a cracked bell gives the only good counsel left.
The rules are old and plain: it counts the knots; a bell rung by hand cuts hunger; paper won't save you. And somewhere between parish law and bayou law, a smooth-voiced developer is selling the town by the acre.
Festival of the Rougarou is a tense, lyrical Southern Gothic thriller about what communities choose to believe-and what the water collects when belief runs out.
Perfect for readers of S.A. Cosby, Jesmyn Ward, T. Kingfisher's folkloric horror, and True Detective (Season 1)-anyone who loves humid dread, working-class resilience, and folklore with teeth.
What you'll find inside
Bayou fog, failing bells, and knotted string ritual
A town polishing its smile for tourists while something watches from the water
Found courage, second chances, and an old debt coming due
Law as ritual, ritual as law-and which one breaks first
Content notes: suspense and creature peril; off-stage deaths; some profanity; non-graphic forensic detail.
Standalone novel.
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