Michael Amos Cody chats to Paul Burke about Avalon Moon, cultural mythology, education and young people, Walnut, North Carolina, the Appalachian mountains, saw mills and repurposing town, outsider/insider.

In Avalon Moon, a local man has gone missing and then is soon found dead in a highland meadow, side-by-side with an unknown woman. When another man and woman go missing and a female deputy is found murdered, Gabriel Tanner, editor of Runion’s weekly newspaper, and Plumer Reeves, a reclusive local hawkshaw working for the niece of the first dead man, suspect a monster is hunting in their western North Carolina mountains. Two extraordinary young women, the Avalon community’s Ariel Anderson and Lonesome Mountain’s Livvy Goforth, join Tanner and Reeves to lead the attempt to discover and stop the killer.

MICHAEL AMOS CODY was born in Sumter, South Carolina, and grew up in the village of Walnut, jewel of Madison County, North Carolina, not far from the ruins of Runion, a place he has reimagined for stories appearing in Tampa Review, Yemassee, The Chaffin Journal, Still: The Journal, and other publications. He spent his formative twenties living and working as a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where his songs were recorded by Glen Campbell, Gary Morris, and others, including himself. He is the author of Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary Magazine: Cultural Journalism in the Early American Republic (McFarland, 2004) and the novel Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press, 2017). He is co-editor of The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, 1803-1807, volume three of The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown (Bucknell UP, 2019). His collection of short stories, A Twilight Reel, was published in May 2021 by Pisgah Press and won the Short Story / Anthology category in the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. His new novel, Streets of Nashville, is scheduled for publication in April 2025 by Madville Publishing. Cody lives with his wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches American literature before 1900, Native American literature, and mythology in the Department of Literature & Language at East Tennessee State University.

Mentions: Leslie Marmon Silko Ceremony, Salman Rushdie Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights, Peter James, Mark Billingham, Michael Connelly.

recommend: Murderland Caroline Fraser

Paul Burke is the editor of Crime Time FM. His first book, Spies on Screen, will be available later this year.

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