King of Nod: Some Things Never Die
Scott Fad
Hooded Friar Press, $18.95, 590 pages, ISBN: 9780981760902
reviewed by Jim Brock

The cover of KING OF NOD features a strikingly beautiful red-head and a banner touting it as "A Southern Gothic Epic". The rest of the book backs up that claim.

Southern? Sweetpatch Island, the focus of the action lies off the South Carolina coast. Southern Gothic? Robert E. Lee Taylor (better known as Boo) returns to the island after 20 years away. This places him in the center of an ongoing drama of race and magic and murderous revenge. Boo has known since he was nine years old that he was adopted but now finds that his true origins have snared him once again in a dangerous situation that threatened him and others he loved but were lost to him in the past. Now back in Sweetpatch to bury his father, he regains one love he had lost but begins the frightening and possibly devastating journey to his ultimate fate.

Southern Gothic Epic? Three names come to mid while reading KING OF NOD: John Saul, Robert McCammon and Dan Simmons. So, yes, any author who conjures up those associations for me is a pleasure to read and recommend. And, Yes, Scott Fad’s KING OF NOD is truly a Southern Gothic Epic.