Stay the hell out of the swamp — the backwater town of Lower Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment.
Lower Congaree is a backwater of a backwater, a poverty-stricken South Carolina town where nail salons come and go, but the Marine recruitment center never closes. Swamp surrounds it, and strangeness stretches back as far as anyone can remember.
For the first time, Undertaker Books has collected Elizabeth Broadbent’s intertwined Southern Gothic stories, including her linked novella, Ink Vine. Swamp witches and standing stones, battered mansions and shoeless patriarchs, strip clubs and roadside diners—Lower Congaree blossoms with the otherworldly, the bizarre, the outcast and the outside of time.
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These are stories where the prose is as lush as the canopy beneath which Lower Congaree’s inhabitants walk. But the descriptions do not detract from the power of the stories. Empathy and affection is clear for those who are poor and ignored, for those who are othered.
— The Horror Tree
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Broadbent's world lures you in with gentle tendrils of growth and fragrant flowers and only when you are in its viney grasp do you realize you are trapped in its thrall as the swamp burbles up its ghastly tales.
--Kate Maruyama, author of Alterations, The Collective, and Bleak Houses
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With lyrical prose and haunting imagery that will chill you to your bones, Broadbent’s new collection weaves hypnotic tales of home and heartache, of family secrets and small town angst, where echoes of the past swirl seductively within the sinister clutches of the swamp itself, where all things here take root. Ink Vine & Other Swamp Stories is an excellent display of Southern gothic at its finest.
—Candace Nola, author of Shadow Manor
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Ink Vine
When exotic dancer Emmy Joiner escapes to the swamp, she meets beautiful, long-legged 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. As Emmy’s life falls apart, her relationship with Zara grows more tangled and bizarre. Zara’s offering something beautiful. Its price may be more than Emmy’s willing to pay.
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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
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