Excerpt, Guest Post, & #Giveaway: Avalon Moon by Michael Amos Cody
- Archaeolibrarian
- 8 hours ago
- 9 min read
Book Details:
Genre: Psychological Horror, Thriller
Published by: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Number of Pages: 340
ISBN: 9781963695670 (ISBN10: 1963695674)
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@michaelamoscody @partnersincrimevbt
@michaelamoscody @partnersincrimevbt
In Avalon Moon, a local man has gone missing and then is soon found dead in a highland meadow, side-by-side with an unknown woman. When another man and woman go missing and a female deputy is found murdered, Gabriel Tanner, editor of Runion’s weekly newspaper, and Plumer Reeves, a reclusive local hawkshaw working for the niece of the first dead man, suspect a monster is hunting in their western North Carolina mountains. Two extraordinary young women, the Avalon community’s Ariel Anderson and Lonesome Mountain’s Livvy Goforth, join Tanner and Reeves to lead the attempt to discover and stop the killer.
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AVALON MOON
a novel
Michael Amos Cody
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
ONE
Gabriel Tanner
“Editor of and chief contributor to a country weekly” never made my top ten list of things I wanted to be when I grew up. For the longest time, I had only one item on that list—Rock Star! I toyed with adding a second item, maybe being just a hit-making songwriter, but the songwriting I did throughout the 1980s was so closely bound up with the Rock Star! idea that I couldn’t pull the two apart. If I didn’t become the next Bruce Springsteen, which I didn’t, I was unlikely to become the next Bob McDill—ditto on the didn’t.
So, with the Rock Star! phase of my life gone grumbling into my dreams, I left Nashville in the hot gut of August 1990, retreated, tail between legs, to Runion, my hometown in the North Carolina mountains, and the following January entered Runion State University, where I double-majored in English and Journalism. I took a part-time job as student reporter and all-around grunt for Sheldon Dean’s Runion Recorder. A couple years after I graduated, Sheldon decided he was tired of writing and offered me a full-time position as editor, keeping only the title of “General Manager” for himself. I accepted.
And so it came to pass that on a cold evening in early March, on the darker side of twilight, I drove toward the Lonesome Mountain end of Genesis Road, planning to swing around the back way into Runion. On regular mornings going to work, or any other time I was in a hurry, I drove down to the French Broad end of Genesis and took the river road up a short hill and onto Main Street, but I was dreading two hours minimum of sitting in a meeting at the Madison County Cooperative Extension Office complex, housed in the recently renovated Old Mill on Mill Street, and taking notes for a regular report to appear in next week’s paper. The room would be stuffy with heat and humanity, and to be honest, I was lollygagging.
This year’s March was looking like a lion-lamb version—in like a lion, out like a lamb. We expected to wake up the next morning to some serious snow and ice courtesy of Winter Storm Ulysses. The fields on my left and the woods on my right seemed to hold their breath in anticipation.
I rolled to a stop at the T-intersection where Genesis Road dead-ends at Jewel Hill Road, with Lonesome Mountain ahead and to my left, dark against the sky. My new Honda hybrid sat quietly, and still not used to its workings, I thought it might have died but relaxed when no warning lights appeared. Even though the temperature was in the upper thirties, I opened my windows and—with no other traveler sitting at my bumper and politely honking, as our mountain folk do—sat at the intersection with my eyes closed and my skin alive to the chilly air. I heard a few of last summer’s still-tethered leaves shivering in the boughs overhead and something scurrying through the underbrush in the woods off to my right. I think I could’ve engaged the emergency brake and gone to sleep, but I opened my eyes, suddenly uneasy and unsure why.
The headlights shown across Jewel Hill Road and lit the lower part of a hillside pasture beyond. A few head of cattle midway up the slope stood at the edge of the light and grazed on pale grass.
Not one to be unnerved by a bovine presence in the twilight, I strained my senses to catch and identify what raised hairs along my forearms and around the back of my neck.
To my left, a field rolled away in successive swells toward a wooded ridge standing blackly against the sky. Runion lay on the other side of that ridge, but somewhere between the town and me, yips and cries rose from the gathering dark. These joined together into an eerie howl of various voices that twisted around one another, broke apart, and swelled together again.
Coyotes.
When I was growing up in these mountains, coyotes existed only in old TV westerns. But they were voice-over actors only, strictly behind-the-scenes. They were soundtrack features. Technicians of ambiance. Nothing said a cowboy was alone in the darkening wilderness like the distant howl of a coyote. The cowboy would raise his eyes from the campfire and sit still and listen for a moment, alert to the wild. But it was never the coyote itself that frightened him. Maybe the coyote’s cry was a reminder of his loneliness and vulnerability—that if such a critter could be out there in the dark, then anything could be out there.
But in recent years, coyotes had loped out of the faded glory of Hollywood’s western and into our world, maybe crossing the Mississippi around Memphis and moving steadily east across Tennessee until they reached Appalachia and Runion. They were seen trotting along the edges of regional four-lanes or lying dead on twisting mountain highways. They stole cats and small dogs just beyond the lights of back porches. That evening at the stop sign, they yipped and yapped and cried somewhere out on the verge of a Runion farmer’s field.
Still, I thought, at least they aren’t wolves. Wolves, of course, were a different story. Send up the howl of a wolf into the night, and the cowboy would become focused on the beast, not on loneliness or vulnerability. The wolf’s howl menaced, threatened. Eyes might shine at the edge of the campfire’s light, followed by snarling close-ups. Then enter the legend of the wolf mixed with a man, and the beast achieved cinematic glory, jumping genres from westerns to horror, something coyotes could never quite pull off.
When I pressed the accelerator, the Honda whispered to life, and I turned left toward town. If I sat there much longer, I would be late for the extension meeting, during which one item on the agenda just happened to be related to the beasts of my T-intersection musing. . . .
“Building Runion”
At some point early in my career as an academic and writer, I ran across a quotation from the great Mississippi author William Faulkner. He said, “... I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it...” Faulkner’s phrasing strikes me as quite original, but his idea about place (setting) isn’t exclusive to him; consider James Joyce’s Dublin, Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia, and Stephen King’s Maine, just to name a few. While I don’t pretend to scale the heights they have ascended in their work, I’m not above borrowing a world-making idea to bring my own fictions to life.
Thus, Runion was born. Actually reborn is more accurate. In Madison County, in Appalachian western North Carolina, the French Broad River cuts through the county and the mountains. At the confluence of the French Broad and its tributary Laurel River, between the still thriving towns of Marshall and Hot Springs, Runion once existed as a sawmill town, populated by a little over one thousand people. But the sawmill shut down sometime in the 1920s, and Runion, whose citizens were mostly millworkers and their families, dwindled to a ghost town. It has remained that way.
You can hike to the ruins of Runion along the Laurel River Trail. Just as you arrive at the French Broad, these ruins stand in the woods around you. You’ll see the stone chimneys of the mill owners’ houses. If you go at the right time in the spring, you might see rows of jonquils in bloom that must have lined the walkways to one owner’s front or back door. You’ll see the foundations of the mill itself and the haunting paymaster’s vault made of twelve- or eighteen-inch-thick concrete walls. When my brother and I hiked there some thirty years ago, remnants of Runion’s one-room schoolhouse could still be found, but the wooden structure had fallen in on itself decades after its last student left town and by now the wood has rotted away.
Following the lights of Faulkner and Joyce in particular, by the time I was writing my second short story, Runion was already beginning to take shape as my “little postage stamp of native soil.” I had begun to build a town and populate it with different kinds of people and their many stories. I adapted characters and characteristics of Madison County’s three main towns—Marshall, Mars Hill, and Hot Springs—and mashed them up to begin making Runion. Marshall is a river town, and a large river island is important to its life. The same is true for Runion. Mars Hill has a college (now called a university, I guess). So does Runion. Hot Springs is, in my view, a quirky little town that these days takes much of its character from water recreation (commercial rafting and the hot springs, in particular) and the nearby Appalachian Trail. Runion has its quirks as well.
My new novel, Avalon Moon, is set almost exclusively in and around Runion, with a couple of forays into wilder places in Madison County and into Asheville. This is my fourth book-length work of fiction, preceded by the novels Gabriel’s Songbook (2017) and Streets of Nashville (2025) and my short story collection A Twilight Reel (2021). With significant portions of both earlier novels set in Runion and the whole of the short story collection set there, I have come to know the town and its people quite well. One boon this familiarity provided to the writing of Avalon Moon came in the form of several characters who appeared in earlier stories. Gabriel Tanner, main character of Gabriel’s Songbook, is now some thirty years older and the primary narrator of Avalon Moon. Another main character, Livvy Goforth, first appeared in the short story “Conversion” (from A Twilight Reel) when she was an interesting five-year-old; she is now in her early twenties and a powerful young woman. I could go on, but I’ll add only that I loved reconnecting with these character and seeing where their lives have brought them.
Avalon Moon has been referred to as Southern Gothic and Appalachian Gothic. I love that, because I love Gothic literature and have taught a number of Gothic-centered courses over the years. The Appalachian landscape that surrounds Runion is, in Avalon Moon, a place where beasts—human and not—roam and roar. The mountains looming over the community are sublime—lovely and dangerous, inspiring and terrifying. In spite of the monsters, beasts, and ghosts who hunt and haunt in Avalon Moon, I love my little town of Runion. One reader of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook wrote that “the fictional town of Runion is one I could live in.” I couldn’t agree more.
Michael Amos Cody is author of the 2017 novel GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK and the 2021 collection A TWILIGHT REEL, winner of the Short Story category in the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. His 2025 literary suspense novel STREETS OF NASHVILLE won the Thriller category in the 2026 Independent Press Awards. His new novel, released in May 2026, is the psychological thriller AVALON MOON. Cody lives with wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches early American literature and creative writing in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
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Thanks for providing this important means of getting the word out about AVALON MOON! Probably the most popular writing advice writers hear is "Write what you know." Having grown up in the western North Carolina portion of the Appalachian Mountains, I know the landscape of AVALON MOON. Another popular piece of advice is "Write what you want to read." This novel is certainly that for me. As for my little town of Runion, it now exists only in ruins and in my fiction, but here's a clip from a 1911 Rand McNally map where you can find Runion, which existed at that time, just below the bold HOT SPRINGS.
Wow, what an interesting guest post! I had never heard of Runion, now I want to go and look it up! This sounds like a great book. thanks so much for sharing!