Velma Loftin-Stoneburner

In the sweltering pines of Cold Branch, Georgia, the ground keeps its own kind of memory. When Earl “Buck” Talbert, brutal patriarch, feared mechanic, and quiet tyrant, vanishes without a trace, no one in town bothers to ask where he went. The Talbert family insists he ran off.

At a midnight crossroads, Phineas Appomatix bartered more than snake-oil and lies, he bartered his bloodline. His curse runs north with the rails, dogging every step of the Cirque des Ténèbres, where prophecy and spectacle blur until no oath can be broken without a price.

The lanterns burn low, the lions walk free, and the Cirque des Ténèbres has risen again from ruin. The Swan, Mei Yee, has lost her great love, Douglas O’Kemp Jr., the man the world called a monster but who was born of violence, shaped by cruelty, and never given a choice to be gentle.

When the hospitals closed, the ghosts went walking. Across three decades of rural Louisiana, four lives collapse under the same slow disaster, the unraveling of America’s public mental health system.

Fatima’s return to Kabul after six years marks the beginning of a journey, she never thought she would take. Her mother, Aisha, is dying, and the city she once fled from calls her back—not just to mourn, but to face the ghosts of her past.

Beneath the striped canvas of the Dark Circus, prophecy, blood, and betrayal collide. When the troupe arrives in Montreal, the Ringmaster Seimouir Dunn believes his crown is unshakable.

Two men missing. A blood-stained chainsaw. Bodies buried shallow in Louisiana soil. When a husband and stepson vanish from Hickory Ridge Road, Sheriff Tom Garrison uncovers more than a crime, he finds a small parish divided by silence, loyalty, and fear.

We Sent Them All: Smoke Over Snuff Ridge is set in pine blanketed hollows of Louisiana, during World War II. It is an intimate look at quiet heroism, heartbreak and endurance of ordinary families during extraordinary times.

A mother’s lie crowns one son and hides another. Seimouir Dunn is laurel-crowned, the golden child marked as the seventh son of prophecy. But Pawlucee, crooked, footless, and forgotten, is the true seventh, scarred by fire yet unbroken.

A word of caution to decent folk and God-fearing travelers: there walks among us a man not born to honor nor to law, but to spite and cruelty. He is called Douglas Flannery O’Kemp, though most know him simply as the Bastard O’Kemp.

In the frost-laden wilds of nineteenth-century Canada, the circus is more than entertainment, it is prophecy in motion. Beneath its striped canvas, where fire bends to a mystic whisper and lions’ pace like kings, crowns are tested, curses awakened, and destinies fulfilled.

In the Pines follows the lives of the Loftin family, their kin, and the women who keep their homes, heal their wounds, and carry their burdens. As sons march off to war and daughters face the echoes of past choices, matriarchs Ma Loftin and Annie Cole anchor a legacy.

In the hushed wilderness of southwest Louisiana, shadows linger longer, and secrets sink deeper.