Overview

Some wounds never fully close. After suspecting her husband has been hexed in Ozark hill country, Lillian Cedars goes deep into the backwoods to seek an antidote. What she finds is a world with a dark and malevolent past, where hill folk and their acolytes turn on anyone who dares enter their territory, and when Lillian encounters them, she learns not only their capacity for evil, but her own as well. The Mysterious Women of J Road presents the collision of superstition and the supernatural in the remote and tangled mountains of southern Missouri. It is a world of secrets whispered between women for generations, women whose ways and whose burdens define who they are, what they stand for, and how far they'll wade into the murk of danger to protect their kin.

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9781953932433

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Reviews

""This Ozarks supernatural thriller has it all, from healers to hexes to howlers, and maybe even Old Scratch himself. But it also has a very human story at its center, a story of love and devotion that outlasts everything the forces of chaos can throw at it."" - Steve Wiegenstein, author of Land of Joys, Scattered Lights, Slant of Light, This Old World, and The Language of Trees ""The Mysterious Women of J Road is an Ozark horror story filled with spells and strange beasts, demons and dark magic. But Allison Cundiff's genius as a storyteller is to ground the tale in even stronger, if far less fantastical stuff: family bonds, the handing down of traditions, and the human imperative to protect those we love. Witches and healers. Vines that sting and vines that soothe. Red-eyed Ozark howlers and good, loyal dogs. Here's a novel to disappear into. You'll come out the other side more aware than ever that the world is a strange and woolly place, and grateful for the guiding hands of the gifted storytellers who help us better understand it all."" - David Williams, author of Come Again No More and Everybody Knows ""From yarb-doctors and granny-women to snake-handling and animal-omens, hexes, howlers, and hoodoo, Cundiff's novel fishes the deep dark pools of Ozarks lore. More, it captures the history-haunted psyche of that landscape: those cricks no sensible person dares cross, and the half-seen things that wander the woods. There are things in the woods that wonder what you taste like. The Thing you can't see is worse than the Thing you can, but worst is the Thing caught fleetingly, out of the corner of one's eye. Cundiff's novel grows from deep folkloric roots, a world where what we're talking about isn't really what we're talking about, where a little girl told the famous field collector Vance Randolph, 'We always lie to strangers.' It works from suspense, but also that emotion's more serious sibling, dread. It joins the growing library of Missouri noir."" - Dr. Adam Brooke Davis, Professor of English, Truman State University, and Editor of GHLL

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