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Loup Garou

Vincent Hérbert is a successful author of a series of books that follow the adventures of Buddy and Theo, an unwitting pair of traveling encyclopedia salesmen, and their accidental but uncanny encounters with area folklore such as Diana of the Dunes, the Pope Lick Monster and the Wendigo cannibals. Despite the fact that Vince was raised in “the place where myth and legend are inseparable from everyday life”, he has thus far avoided imaginatively revisiting Louisiana with his fictional protagonists. Neither has he returned home with his wife Anna and their three young children in large part because of a particular monster that he has never forgotten from his past. Eventually his agent Lydia, because of the marketing potential she recognizes, and Anna, because she senses the presence of a secret ghost that is causing her husband to drift farther away from his family, conspire to change his mind. As expected, Vince finds no shortage of local legends for Buddy and Theo to interact with including the Hellhounds of Barataria Bay, The Devil Man of Algiers, The Grunch, the Honey Island Swamp Monster, and the ghost of Mary Glass. But his research, along with seemingly fated circumstances, are also reacquainting him with all the disappointments, mistakes and regrets that he’d run away from so many years ago. Many of those regrets resurface when he reunites with his sister Genie whom he abandoned after she become pregnant out of wedlock, and his cousin Laurent who followed him into the sables mouvants [quicksand]. The target of much of his resentment is his deceased père [father] whom he unexpectedly discovers he has much in common with. The revelations have only just begun however, as all paths inevitably lead him into confrontation with the legendary loup garou [Cajun werewolf] and it quickly becomes evident that this time there is no option where both he and the haunting animal survive.

Stained Glass

What if the things that we do and don’t do really matter? What if there really is a purpose to our lives? What if there really is someone or something out there, up there? Lionel Elijah Buckner Jr. is comfortable if not completely satisfied with a life consumed by unapologetic self-indulgence. After all, he was the one who survived the challenges of his mixed race upbringing in the deep-south. He was the one who had the courage to move away to New York City and start anew. He was the one responsible for transforming his crude interest in art into a recently uninspired career as an abstract painter. It was remarkable just how much his life had changed since he had assumed complete control over it. But then out of the blue, he receives a call which ever so subtly alters his path. And despite his best initial efforts to keep himself isolated from the stagnant Mississippi muck of his past, a succession of inexplicable coincidences eventually entangle him in the lives of the narrow-minded simpletons he’d thought he’d left behind. Along the way, he is reacquainted with a father he never really knew on his improbable journey back home.