Where Dark Things Grow

Fifteen-year-old Leo is watching the world crumble. His father is missing and his mother is slipping into madness as she cares for Leo, his sick sister Goldfish, and two useless brothers. Relatives are no help and the church folk have turned their backs in the midst of the Great Depression.

When he discovers an enchanted wulver from ancient folklore that will do his bidding, he decides to settle old scores. Revenge is sweet, but Leo soon learns he can't control what he's unleashed. It takes his spitfire best friend Lilyfax to help Leo overcome his anger and try to escape the wulver's evil. As they search for his father, Leo, Lilyfax, and friends are pursued by dark forces and pulled into a rescue effort to find and save trafficked girls rumored to have been taken by the mysterious Blue Man.

Featuring elements of horror, folklore, and magical realism, Where Dark Things Grow is a dark bildungsroman set squarely in the place and culture of the 1930s Southern Appalachian Mountains.

If you're a fan of magical realism and Appalachian Gothic, Andrew K. Clark's Where Dark Things Grow is a must-read -- a high and haunting tale of highland lore that burns with forces both dark and light, rendered with a poet's eye for detail and wild sparks of wonder.
-Taylor Brown, author of Rednecks and Gods of Howl Mountain

Earthy, primal horror full of backwoods magic and poetry, Where Dark Things Grow is a terrific first showing by a lyrical new voice. Andrew K. Clark is one to watch!
-Andy Davidson, author of The Hollow Kind

This is Southern Gothic that blows the rockers right off that big Appalachian front porch. Andrew K. Clark has written a fierce narrative rife with an evil foreboding in the 1930s, North Carolina, Blue Ridge mountains. Prose that shimmers with the atmosphere of the darkest midnight hue. All Hail Where Dark Things Grow- a novel that burns with frozen blue horrors.
-Daren Dean, author of Roads, This Vale of Tears, and The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American South

With roots as deep and tangled as the Blue Man's trees, Where Dark Things Grow is a mesmerizing tale of magic and monsters, of family and fate, but also a reflection on the problem of power and the weight of abuses the most vulnerable carry, and how maybe we should be looking to the children to save us. A bold debut from a natural storyteller.
-Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs and Here in the Dark

Stephen King meets Appalachia meets Flannery O'Connor's the Misfit.
-Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit this to No One

Let me be plain - Where Dark Things Grow is full of magic, in the deepest, oldest sense of the word. At times endearing, at times brutal, but at all times haunting, Andrew K. Clark's debut novel is a spiraling tale in the greatest tradition of the Southern Gothic. Creeping out of the mythic and the monsters, the Old Testament revenge lines and the old world occult, is a tale of men and women, boys and girls, each at their most fallible, each being tempted and tested. This is not the sort of praise I throw around lightly, but it must be said- with Where Dark Things Grow Clark has made his mark in Appalachian literature.
-Steph Post, author of Miraculum

Cowboy Jamboree Press
good grit lit.