Midnight is the Darkest Hour

Ruth Cornier is the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher in Bottom Springs, Louisiana, a town dominated by a strict religious cult and the legend of a man-eating creature called the Lowlands Killer. Ruth exists on the fringes of her community, bonded only to Everett, a local outcast with a dangerous reputation. When a skull is discovered in the swamp, the pair must conceal their own involvement in a past death while navigating the town’s escalating religious fervor and the hyper-masculine violence of the local leadership.

Readers who enjoy Southern Gothic settings and stories about the suffocating nature of ideological extremism will find this work useful. It appeals to those interested in the fallout of purity culture and the way insular communities use folklore to enforce social control. The reader finishes the book with a dark perspective on how outcasts forge their own morality when traditional institutions fail them. It provides a grim look at the cost of survival in a place that equates female independence with sin.