A novel of the Gulf South — where cypress swamps hold their secrets, and the silences between neighbors grow heavy with what cannot be said.
Fiction from the American Threshold
Bruce Elliot Alford
Southern Gothic fiction, poetry, and notes on landscape, grief, and moral attention.
The Novel
Let Them Fall
Toy Haughery wears her scars the way other girls wear jewelry. When she and her friend Indira pry open an old concrete pit and find the dried, small bodies of girls, their small, drought-struck parish bends toward rumor and the comfortable lie of suicide.
What should be an official investigation curdles into whispers and cover-ups — and then, into arson, accusation, and blood.
Atmospheric literary fiction meets gritty crime storytelling — dense sense-of-place and moral complexity propelled by a central mystery and community rivalries.
Field Notes
Entry I — The Levee
The water never settles.
I sit next to the Mississippi River. Rebar sticks out of broken concrete and brick, which cements vast sections of the bank. It feels as though I am examining my life, or reading about it — looking at asphalt splits, watching grass force its way through.
Entry II — The Best Sleep
Granite lay along the riverbank.
When my parents pulled our battered station wagon beside the levee, the sun was already gathering up its warmth and retreating behind a blue-green horizon. I sat on a granite block watching my parents cast their lines.
From the Poems
It is Sunday morning on the Mississippi.
Oil has washed up on the bank.
An old man leans against a 74 Ford
parked on top.
You can still see the boy in his face.
— Spill
About the Author
"He has compassion and intelligence and control."
— Marge Piercy
Bruce Elliot Alford is a writer and professor of literature and creative writing at Louisiana State University. His work is shaped by the landscapes of the Gulf South — levees, cypress swamps, and the uneasy border where nature presses against the built world.
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