Mother of Serpents

Brooklyn-based poet DuVone Mapley-Stevenson is already struggling with fragile mental health when his white husband Jack gets a promotion that means them relocating to all-white Kwawidokawa County, upstate Maine. At first it seems this could be a fresh start for the financially-stretched family, even if the house Jack has found them is suspiciously cheap.

Determined to make the most of the move for the sake of their young son, stay-at-home dad Vone is at once destabilized by the racial, cultural and geographic isolation. When strange

sights and sounds start to press in on him, he initially doesn’t dare share with Jack what he at first assumes must be recurring delusive thinking. And then he starts to fear that the increasingly threatening uncanny phenomena are real.

As a series of terrifying events begin to tear apart the boundaries between sanity and reality, myth and science, Vone finds himself fighting a life-and-death battle with both the monsters who roam the mind and those that slither across the boundaries between their worlds and our own...

Fusing a convincing portrait of psychosis and its aftermath with occult and indigenous lore, the legacy of New England witch trials, gothic Americana and the lived experiences of a multi-

cultural queer family in a world of racial and social discord, award-winning John R. Gordon’s new novel of unease will set your pulse racing and have you looking over your shoulder for

things glanced in mirrors.