ELIZABETH BROADBENT
Coming April 3, 2025 from Raw Dog Screaming Press
No one cares when Lila Carson’s ten-year-old brother Beau disappears. He can’t speak. He throws tantrums. He’s a useless Carson, one of those kids in a broken-shuttered house that lost its glory when his father died. When the sheriff and his good ol’ boy deputies show up to investigate, they eye up Lila and call her twin brother, Quentin, names. A closeted bisexual girl in the South, she’s terrified.
Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment: Don’t go in that swamp. But as the long night drags on, it’s clear Beau disappeared behind those ancient trees. The sheriff’s deputies won’t risk going back there.
Lila might not have a choice.
“With echoes of Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Eliza Broadbent’s southern gothic, Blood Cypress, seethes with swamp-rot and small-town prejudice. Dark and lush and deeply, deeply disturbing, it’s an exquisite tale of grief and trauma, solidifying Broadbent’s place as a champion for the outsider. A revelation.”
—Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories
"Elizabeth Broadbent discovers a creek that connects directly to Michael McDowell’s Blackwater mythos, leading readers through this beautiful backwater novella. This missing child manhunt is steeped in so much southern gothic, it feels like Faulkner, O’Connor, and Sheperd have all joined the search party.”—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
​
“Mesmerizing! Broadbent weaves a tale about the pain of growing up ‘different’ and the desperation of a failing family legacy. Much like the swamp at its center, this story is filled with southern heat, twists and turns, and insidious monsters waiting to swallow you whole.”—Aimee Hardy, author of Pocket Full of Teeth
“Like the dark swamp at its heart, this book melds Southern Gothic with folk horror in a delightful way. A bold, assured narrative voice that will lure readers into its fetid darkness.”—Tim McGregor, author of Eynhallow
Sometimes, you just pick your poison and pray. Stay the hell out of the swamp — the backwater town of Lower Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment. When exotic dancer Emmy Joiner sneaks under the dark tree-canopy behind her family trailer, she meets mysterious, tattooed Zara, the first girl she dares to kiss.
But the small-town South hates a woman who dares to dance instead of plucking chickens for minimum wage, and as Emmy’s life falls apart, her relationship with Zara grows more tangled and bizarre. Zara’s offering something beautiful. But while Emmy’s slowly strangling, its price may be more than she’s willing to pay.
Shifting between the green-bright cypress cathedral and the dreamland of a dance club, Broadbent’s unforgettably-voiced debut confronts the brutal realities of poverty in the South, with a sapphic tale both sultry and sinister, gritty and gothic.
​
​
"A stunning debut with a narrative voice so strong, you'll feel the swamp breathing down your neck. Eerie and very moving."
—Tim McGregor, author of Eynhallow and Wasps in the Ice Cream
"Ink Vine is a lush and deliciously queer Southern Gothic romance about desire and the things we will do to sate it. Broadbent's richly drawn characters and smart, evocative prose gives new meaning to the phrase ‘blossoming love.’ Emerald's longing--for acceptance, for love, for something more--haunts every word and sets the stage for a beautiful narrative about acceptance, self-discovery, and the power of connection.”
—Jolie Toomajan, editor of Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic
"Elizabeth Broadbent combines a steamy love story with important observations about desperation, fear, and acceptance. Ink Vine, with its elements of dark fantasy and botanical horror, reminded me of True Blood!"
—Christi Nogle, author of the Bram Stoker Award winning first novel Beulah
"Broadbent's storytelling is equal parts captivating and unnerving. Blood Cypress is a magnificently layered tale where gender and sexuality dynamics are intricately woven into a poignant southern gothic layered atop a devastating family tragedy. Her carefully crafted words grip you by the throat and squeeze."
— L. Marie Wood, author of The Realm Trilogy and The Promise Keeper
Watch the Book Trailer for Ink Vine
Keeping Up with the Kardashians meets The X-Files on a Southern plantation.
Problematic? Absolutely.​​
The Trenholm clan helped found Lower Congaree, South Carolina. Their land is cursed. Their abusive patriarch has croaked. Only heirs who attend the funeral will inherit.
But when Truluck Trenholm suffered his eventually-fatal stroke, oldest son Ash turned the haunted plantation into an enormously successful reality show—with all the attendant ethical issues of profiting off its legacy. Forced to tolerate the intrusion of California producers, grip guys, and cameras, toting a ton of childhood trauma, Ash’s brother and cousins have plenty of animosity for each other, along with a strong aversion to the paranormal shenanigans of their childhood home. But when Truluck’s funeral goes pear-shaped and the cousins are cut out of his will, Hollywood producers offer the deal of a they’ll turn the Trenholms into witchy Kardashians with a Southern drawl.
If the cousins walk away, they’ll lose everything. But the farm’s high strangeness keeps getting stranger. Something’s happening on Cypress Bend. And filming might make it worse…
Combining the literary tradition of William Faulkner, Michael McDowell, and Octavia Butler with the shimmered lunacy of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Elizabeth Broadbent’s Ninety-Eight Sabers is a Southern Gothic novel about a family determined to stick together as history threatens to tear them apart. This is a book that asks how we live with the past—and how we accept our responsibility for it in the present.
Read my Latest Substack Posts
A speculative fiction author and journalist, Elizabeth Broadbent lives in the second-snarkiest city in the South, though her heart lies buried somewhere in South Carolina's swamps. After obtaining an MFA in creative writing from the University of South Carolina, she quit a PhD program in composition and rhetoric to stay home and play with words. Her life bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Malcolm in the Middle. Read more about her here. You can also check out her books, horror, sci-fi, poetry, and essays.
CONTACT
eliza@writerelizabethbroadbent.com
Instagram: @EABroadbent