Volume Two · Fiction
Saluda.
Southern Gothic Fantasy. The Legacy Saga.
Three books in development
Cross the Tree Line
CURRENTLY QUERYING
"Some truths are like wolves. Once you let them out,
there's no putting them back."
From Chapter 23 · Hungry Like the Wolf
The Saga
Saluda sits on top of a vine.
Saluda, South Carolina sits on top of a vine. Brought from Switzerland and planted in soil already charged with Cherokee song, Gullah rootwork, Highland grief and pirate iron, it grew into something the founders never agreed on and never finished. Every twenty-five years, the town wakes up enough to remember.
Mythology that didn't get domesticated. Bargains struck in the dark
that nobody quite remembers signing.
The Saluda saga is a Southern Gothic universe rooted in Appalachian folklore, traveling-show culture and the long shadow tradition of the American South. Three books. Seven founding bloodlines. Twenty-five-year cycles. The descendants who keep getting handed a story they never asked to inherit.
YA Southern Gothic Fantasy crossing into adult horror, told as one connected series. The kind of books that find you at fifteen and find you again at forty-five.
The second time around, they're a different book.
The Legacy Saga
Three books. One vine.
Each volume picks up a different thread of the bloodline.
The cycle started in 1878. It hasn't closed yet.
Volume One
Currently Querying
Saluda Awakens
The saga opens with Ozzie Meister, a sixteen-year-old synesthete who hears Song Lines other people don't, and learns his pirate ancestor left him more than a name.
Volume Two
In Editorial Revision
Vinum Immortale
Volume two picks up with Finn, a New Orleans loup-garou pulled into the woods between shapes.
Volume Three
In Planning & Drafting
WolfGator
WolfGator closes the cycle that started in 1878.
Possum Grove, 1878.
Possum Grove, 1878.
Before the Mystica Crew. Before Finn heard his grandmother's voice in an empty room. Before anyone alive remembered why the carnival keeps coming
back to the same ground.
Someone stood very still and let them look.
His bones are in the soil. The vine grew through them.
Why This Series
I never planned to write fantasy.
I planned to write nonfiction. Communities and stories and the way people find their words.
But the Saluda I grew up in has always been louder than the Saluda on the map. The vine. The carnival. The families who don't talk about what their grandparents agreed to.
The town wakes up every twenty-five years for a reason. I've been listening for that reason my whole life.
These are the books that came of that listening. Fiction, because some truths only come out when you change their names.
For Agents & Editors
Saluda Awakens at a glance.
Title
Saluda Awakens (Book One of the Legacy Saga)
Genre
Southern Gothic Fantasy
Age Category
YA, crossing into adult
Word Count
93,000
Status
Manuscript complete. Currently querying agents.
Comparable Titles
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (tentative)
Three books planned. Saluda Awakens, Vinum Immortale, WolfGator.
Connected saga across generations and bloodlines.
Geno Church · Co-author of Brains on Fire (Wiley, 2008) and
The Passion Conversation (Wiley, 2013) · Full bio →
geno@genochurch.com
The Series
Author
Reach
Stay Close to the Fire
Dispatches from the Wilderness.
Occasional letters from the wilderness while the book finds its way
to readers. Notes on the work. Field reports. The kind of thing you'd
want to receive on the morning of a hard week.