Beneath the Black Water: A Southern Gothic Cosmic Horror Novel

A hundred years ago, a congregation walked into the bayou and never came back up. They are still down there. And they have been waiting for him. Detective Remy Boudreaux came home to grieve a career, not to chase a killer. But the bodies surfacing in the black water of his childhood parish are arranged like sacraments, and the hurricane spinning toward the Louisiana coast is no ordinary storm. The abandoned churches lean wrong on their foundations. His great-aunt salts the thresholds against something she refuses to name. And the boy who drowned beside him when they were seven, the case the parish never solved, is whispering from beneath the surface in a voice Remy is starting to recognize. The murders form a pattern. The pattern forms a church. And the altar is Mama Vee's house. BENEATH THE BLACK WATER is a slow-burning Southern Gothic cosmic horror novel set deep in Louisiana bayou country, where an older faith has been dreaming under the swamp longer than Christianity and longer than memory. It is a detective mystery, a religious horror story, and a descent into the kind of holiness that was never on humanity's side. For readers who love eldritch horror, occult detective fiction, drowned-town folklore, swamp gothic atmosphere, and protagonists who discover too late that they were never the ones doing the investigating. The storm is coming. The congregation is patient. And the case Remy Boudreaux thinks he is solving is the smallest, most irrelevant thing about the night ahead.