Fiction – Fantasy – Historical – Southern

RELEASE DATE: 10/21/2025 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER’S WAREHOUSE)

Ignyte and Mythopoeic Award-winning author Eden Royce pens a Southern Gothic historical fantasy story of a contentious funeral in her adult fiction debut.

Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. Coddled to within an inch of her life by a mother who refuses to let her daughter live a life other than the one she dictates, Phee yearns to demonstrate she’s capable of more than simply marrying well.

When word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother’s wrath to step up and accept the role of pompthe highly honored duty of planning the funeral service. Traveling alone to the town of Horizon and her aunt’s unsettling home, Phee soon discovers that visions and shadows beckon from every reflective surface, and that some secrets transcend the borders of life and death.

AUTHOR BIO:

Eden Royce is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina now living in Southeast England. She’s a Shirley Jackson Award winner and a Bram Stoker Award nominee for her adult fiction, which has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. Her books for young readers have won multiple awards, including the Ignyte, the Bram Stoker, and the Walter Dean Myers Honor.

Review Quotes:

“Royce wraps magical rituals of death and remembrance into a tale of love and duty…this Southern gothic historical fantasy is a coming-of-age story set in the magical, semi-mythical towns of New Charleston and Horizon, amid a post-Reconstruction free Black social order that will delight readers of Leslye Penelope, Nekesa Afia, and C. L. Polk.”–Library Journal(starred review)

“A tale of loss and hope and how the present can give way to new futures.”–KirkusReviews

“Adeeply loving exploration of grief, loss, and the righting of past wrongsas experienced by a young woman who’s coming into her own power for the first time in her life. It’s set in a lush and complex world with a history and magic all its own, andI highly recommend it.“–Moniquill Blackgoose, author ofTo Shape a Dragon’s Breath

“Literary brilliance…Psychopomp & Circumstanceis a lovely meditation on life, death, and choice. Eden Royce has another home run on her hands.”–Locus

“Quietly atmospheric southern-gothic.”–Booklist