Why You'll Love This
A daughter of Reconstruction-era South Carolina plans a dead aunt's funeral — and discovers the dead have opinions about it.
- Great if you want: Southern Gothic atmosphere steeped in Black history and folk magic
- The experience: Short, dense, and quietly unsettling — reads in a single sitting
- The writing: Royce layers sensory detail and cultural specificity into every scene
- Skip if: you want expansive worldbuilding — at 163 pages, it moves fast
About This Book
In post-Civil War South Carolina, Phee St. Margaret has spent her whole life being managed — her choices made, her future mapped, her ambitions quietly suffocated by a mother with ironclad opinions about what a respectable young Black woman should want. When a distant, estranged aunt dies and Phee steps forward to serve as pomp — the family's funeral steward — she seizes the first real agency she's ever had. What follows is part coming-of-age, part ghost story, part reckoning with family silence, set against the fragile, complicated optimism of Reconstruction-era Black life. The stakes are intimate and personal, but they carry the weight of history.
Eden Royce writes Southern Gothic the way it should be written: atmosphere thick as Spanish moss, dread that arrives slowly and stays. At 163 pages, the book is precise rather than slight — every sentence is doing something, and the pacing trusts readers to sit with discomfort rather than rushing toward resolution. Royce layers folklore and family mythology into her prose without over-explaining either, and the result feels rooted and strange in equal measure. This is a book that rewards patience and close attention.