QSFer Michael G. Williams has a new queer cosmic horror book out: Children of Solitude.
This Appalachian cosmic horror novel tells the story of a gay man who must return to his ancestral home in the mountains of Western North Carolina after his mother’s death to clean it out and sell it off. Navigating feelings of grief and anger, he finds her house is haunted and her nosy neighbors always watching him-and one of those neighbors happens to be his favorite adult performer. While he develops a new romance and oversees his mother’s funeral, tension builds as the characters’ circumstances go from ominously creepy to terrifying.
Warnings: Frank discussion (but NOT depiction) of sexual abuse and drug abuse in characters’ past; frank discussion of religious trauma; depiction of religious-based prejudice against queer people; mild depiction of sexual contact; depiction of mild violence and depiction of threats of self-harm.
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Excerpt
“Appalachian America may be useful as furnishing a fixed point which enables us to measure the progress of the moving world […] As we need a fresh air fund for the little ones of the city, we need a fresh idea fund for these sons and daughters of solitude.” —William Goodell Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” The Atlantic, March 1899
Chapter One – The Vision
October 2021
Reginald Voth’s dead mother first appeared to him at the moment of her own demise: a quarter to four on a Tuesday morning as he sat in bed trying to read.
He knew he had not nodded off and dreamt it. Reginald, wide awake, held a cigarette in one hand and his book in the other, an old paperback novel he picked up at the thrift store. Reading always kept him awake rather than putting him to sleep.
As Reginald reached to tap ash into a big glass tray on the nightstand beside him he jumped halfway out of his skin at what sounded like a shotgun going off in the room. He might have screamed, might have awakened the man snoring softly next to him, perhaps have called 911 or reached for his old Louisville Slugger or something in response if Dorothea Voth, his long-suffering and long-inflicting-suffering-on-others mother, had not appeared standing at the foot of the bed in a bright purple bathrobe, its lapels embroidered with lilies. Under that she wore a too-loud orange and yellow nightgown patterned in stars and moons. Dorothea’s chosen layers clashed horribly, and Reginald found himself embarrassed that was what he thought first.
Dorothea stood, arms upheld, her hands extended as though she reached to catch something tossed aside by the gods. She bore an ugly expression of agonized beseeching on her narrow, upturned face. Her eyes stood out wide and solid white, but Reginald saw no pupils, no irises. Her flesh had been torn open all over by countless tiny cuts and scrapes. Blood matted her white-black hair, ran down her neck, and stained those lilies on her lapels. Leaves and twigs clung to her bathrobe all over. Pine needles matted against innumerable wounds.
Dorothea Voth might have been standing up and shouting, but she also was clearly and unmistakably dead.
Light surrounded Dorothea like a spotlight on a stage, a light so bright and sharp it hurt Reginald’s eyes to look at her. Dorothea’s mouth gaped in a silent scream. Reginald realized time passed for him, but not for her. Smoke from his cigarette drifted through the room, but within the column of light all matter stood still as stone, fixed as a photograph.
My mother is dying, Reginald thought. He took a long drag from the cigarette, held the smoke, let it out. My mother is dead.
What surprised him most was how this didn’t feel like some news item delivered from outside. Reginald felt the certainty of Dorothea’s death from deep within, like a thing he’d already known and forgotten.
Reginald listened to the old grandfather clock in his single-wide trailer’s front room as it ticked away, talking to itself. It was part of the background machinery of life one eventually forgets to hear until it’s all one can hear. Five seconds passed while he counted, then ten. He took another drag off the Virginia Slim and stage whispered, wanting to speak but afraid of waking the sleeper beside him. “Mother,” he hissed. “Mother, speak to me.” When she neither said nor did anything, Reginald reflexively went for the insult. “Mother, you’re facing the wrong direction. Pretty sure you’re supposed to be on the elevator down.”
Nothing.
Dorothea Voth spent 37 seconds standing at the foot of her son Reginald’s bed, 37 ticks of that grandfather clock standing in his trailer 37 miles from her home, and never took her not-eyes off whatever she saw in the place where she stood dying.
It would be three months before Reginald noticed that coincidence of time and distance.
The spotlight on Dorothea went out.
A silhouette of Dorothea lingered a moment longer, a shadow in the dark room, perhaps no more than a reverse-imprint on his retina. Then it, too, was gone.
Reginald stubbed out the Virginia Slim and took another from the pack.
The man next to him stirred in his sleep as Reginald lit the new cig. “Are you awake?”
Reginald didn’t look down at him. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“Everything okay?”
“Hard to say,” Reginald answered. He picked up the little glass of whiskey next to the ashtray and drained the last from it. “It could be things are getting better, though.” Now Reginald finally looked over in the direction of the man’s voice. His eyes had started adjusting to the darkness again and he could make out the man’s long, straight hair and the curve of a shoulder. “Tell me your name again?”
Three hours later, Reginald’s phone rang to tell him what was no longer news.
Author Bio
Michael G. Williams writes queer-themed horror and science fiction celebrating the monstrous and the macabre. His books include the award-winning vampire series The Withrow Chronicles (Laine Cunningham Award); the thrilling urban fantasy time travel series Servant Sovereign; the sci-fi noir A Fall in Autumn (Manly Wade Wellman Award); and a mess of short stories. Michael strives to present the humor and humanity at the heart of horror and sci fi with stories of outcasts and loners finding their people and power. Children of Solitude is his thirteenth book.
Michael co-hosts Arcane Carolinas and Data@Rest, studied Performance Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University, and is a brother in St. Anthony Hall and Mu Beta Psi. He is an active member of SFWA, HWA, and is a Trustee of the NC Writers Network. He lives in North Carolina with his husband and a variety of animals.
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