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Palm Beach Gothic
Paperback
General GLBTQIA FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 29 2026
Pages: 220
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
From the author of Kinetic Blue comes Palm Beach Gothic, a novel-in-stories of Southern Gothic gone Floridian, with affectionate portraits of subtropical eccentricity.
Palm Beach Gothic takes an unconventional approach to the mystery genre, combining a hit-and-run investigation with queer social comedy, Florida Gothic, family sketches, and cultural satire. The strange collision of Palm Beach privilege, dive-bar drama, eccentric locals, and subtle supernatural touches gives the collection an identity far outside the standard whodunit.
The BookLife Prize
Paul Kevin Wood's PALM BEACH GOTHIC is a collection of nine stories that cover everything from family and children to relationships, religion, politics, and life in Florida. Some are funny, some are much more serious, and a few manage to be both at the same time. What connects most of them is Wood's interest in people, places, and the peculiar situations that can come out of everyday life.
At its best, the collection feels like someone looking closely at the people and places around him and telling you exactly what he sees.
Katherine Crucilla for IndieReader
Along Dixie Highway, where Palm Beach's gilded world ends and something rawer begins, elegance adjoins ruin. Palm Beach Gothic moves from the Covid-policed beaches of California to the polo fields of Wellington, from the sashay of Key West drag queens to a megachurch service built on smoke machines and selective scripture, from moss-draped Savannah - gothic in the old, literal sense - to a Florida gothic all its own, all orbiting the gravitational center of the pink The Colony Hotel on Palm Beach Island, with its spectral leprechauns and disappearing monkeys, and the dive bar Mad's, miles south with a bright red door.
At the heart of the collection is the novella Palm Beach Gothic: A Tale of Midnight on Dixie Highway, where a glamorous, sardonic drag performer known as Miss Aperitif holds court among an ensemble of loyalists, misfits, and colonizers, until a rainy Pride night ends in violence no one will acknowledge and grief no one quite knows how to perform. These stories blend biting satire and empathy to explore who we are in private-and what we owe others when the people we love are gone.
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