Showing results by author "Velma Loftin-Stoneburner" in All Categories

We Sent Them All: Smoke Over Snuff Ridge is set in pine blanketed hollows of Louisiana, during World War II. It is an intimate look at quiet heroism, heartbreak and endurance of ordinary families during extraordinary times.

A girl who walks with beasts. A circus that feeds on fire. A road that remembers every bargain. When Eveline Marr moves north under cover of spectacle, survival becomes a matter of timing rather than strength. Rooted in Appalachian folklore and dark Americana, this story explores restraint as power, shelter as danger, and the cost of saying yes when the road asks. Beasts follow her not by chain, but by recognition. As hunters, fire, and spectacle converge, she must choose when to be seen and when to vanish.

In the sweltering pines of Cold Branch, Georgia, the ground keeps its own kind of memory. When Earl “Buck” Talbert, brutal patriarch, feared mechanic, and quiet tyrant, vanishes without a trace, no one in town bothers to ask where he went. The Talbert family insists he ran off. The tomato patch behind his cinderblock house says otherwise.

At a midnight crossroads, Phineas Appomatix bartered more than snake-oil and lies, he bartered his bloodline. His curse runs north with the rails, dogging every step of the Cirque des Ténèbres, where prophecy and spectacle blur until no oath can be broken without a price.

The lanterns burn low, the lions walk free, and the Cirque des Ténèbres has risen again from ruin. The Swan, Mei Yee, has lost her great love, Douglas O’Kemp Jr., the man the world called a monster but who was born of violence, shaped by cruelty, and never given a choice to be gentle. In the hush after his death, she wakes with a secret beneath her heart, a child born not of sin, but of mercy.

When the hospitals closed, the ghosts went walking. Across three decades of rural Louisiana, four lives collapse under the same slow disaster, the unraveling of America’s public mental health system. Eustis Mallory, a Korean War veteran with half his skull gone, spends his final years circling a hallway in a state hospital that no longer exists. Clara Mae Ellison, a preacher’s wife consumed by divine whispers, leads her children into the Red River believing she’s saving their souls.

Fatima’s return to Kabul after six years marks the beginning of a journey, she never thought she would take. Her mother, Aisha, is dying, and the city she once fled from calls her back—not just to mourn, but to face the ghosts of her past. Her father, Mustafa, and her uncle, Reza, are waiting for her, but their intentions are veiled in ambiguity. And there, amid the memories of war and love, is Zafir—her former husband, the father of her daughter Zohra, and the man she thought she had lost forever.

Beneath the striped canvas of the Dark Circus, prophecy, blood, and betrayal collide. When the troupe arrives in Montreal, the Ringmaster Seimouir Dunn believes his crown is unshakable. But among the new arrivals is Eveline Marr, the Keeper of the Menagerie, a half-monster in a human mask, her cages filled with stitched horrors and a moth child that kills without sound. As elephants refuse to kneel, lions roar defiance, and hunters stalk the shadows, alliances fracture. Pawlucee Dunn, the scarred clown and true seventh son, must decide whether to defend the circus or watch it burn.

Born with visions pressed against his chest like a second heart, Song walks along a road no other can see. Omens follow him, the scream of the panther from the ridge, the pale Indian Pipe rising in the dark soil, the red-banded Cecropia moth beating its wings against firelight. These are not accidents. These are messages. Song has been chosen to carry them. But every song casts a shadow. That shadow has a name: Cypian, the River Wolf.

Two men missing. A blood-stained chainsaw. Bodies buried shallow in Louisiana soil. When a husband and stepson vanish from Hickory Ridge Road, Sheriff Tom Garrison uncovers more than a crime, he finds a small parish divided by silence, loyalty, and fear. At the center: Franklin “Frank” Dorsey, a haunted Vietnam veteran, and Calvin Reed, the fragile young man who follows him.

A mother’s lie crowns one son and hides another. Seimouir Dunn is laurel-crowned, the golden child marked as the seventh son of prophecy. But Pawlucee, crooked, footless, and forgotten, is the true seventh, scarred by fire yet unbroken.

A word of caution to decent folk and God-fearing travelers: there walks among us a man not born to honor nor to law, but to spite and cruelty. He is called Douglas Flannery O’Kemp, though most know him simply as the Bastard O’Kemp. He was sired by a planter of ill repute and a servant woman of northern stock, pale as snow and marked by heathen tales. From his first breath he was raised on blows, and from his fifteenth year he carried his father’s scalp to market for coin. Since that day, he has known neither home nor mercy.

Appomatix stands unshaken in his crown, master of the pride whose roar steadies the sawdust ring. At his side, Vaidya weaves fire and shadow, her chants feeding both wonder and fear. And from the forest emerges Lazare, a youth half-feral, half-royal, the living echo of Henrik’s final prophecy, a ringmaster born of blood, music, and myth. Together they forge a power both enthralling and dangerous: the crown, the fire, and the voice. But the line between spectacle and fate grows thin, and what is born in the ring may yet consume them all.

In the Pines follows the lives of the Loftin family, their kin, and the women who keep their homes, heal their wounds, and carry their burdens. As sons march off to war and daughters face the echoes of past choices, matriarchs Ma Loftin and Annie Cole anchor a legacy woven with heartbreak, resilience, and quiet magic. From the work camps of the South to the icy shores of the Aleutian Islands, this sweeping saga captures the strength of ordinary people in extraordinary times, people who bury their dead, raise each other’s children, and fight fiercely for every small joy that remains.

In the hushed wilderness of southwest Louisiana, shadows linger longer, and secrets sink deeper. When two bodies are discovered in the pine-strewn outskirts of Beauregard Parish, an innocent child dressed for church and his young stepmother whispers stir beneath the magnolias and coffee brews dark at The Oaks Café. Roy Allen Cormier’s arrest stuns a town that watched him grow up and ride his bike down gravel backroads. But guilt is never simple in a place where loyalty runs deep, and justice doesn’t always arrive clean.