From the critically acclaimed author of In My Dreams I Hold A Knife and The Last Housewife comes a gothic Southern thriller about a killer haunting a small Louisiana town, where two outcasts—the preacher’s daughter and the boy from the wrong side of the tracks—hold the key to uncovering the truth.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Ashley Winstead’s Midnight Is The Darkest Hour, which is out October 3rd.
For fans of Verity and A Flicker in the Dark, this is a twisted tale of murder, obsessive love, and the beastly urges that lie dormant within us all…even the God-fearing folk of Bottom Springs, Louisiana. In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist.
Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners’ bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar—and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.
A dark and powerful novel like fans have come to expect from Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is an examination of the ways we’ve come to expect love, religion, and stories to save us, the lengths we have to go to in order to take back power, and the monstrous work of being a girl in this world.
Chapter Two
June, Seventeen Years Old
I was seventeen when I went on my first date, much later than the other girls. Since courting for marriage is one of the only forms of entertainment we’ve got down here in Bottom Springs, and bored girls in small towns are inclined toward entertainment, we tend to start quick. But late or not, it was a miracle I had a date at all. For one thing, my father is Pastor James Cornier, preacher at Holy Fire Born Again and spiritual leader to every soul in Trufayette Parish, minus the handful of Godless heathens. Not many boys want to date a preacher’s daughter, and rightfully so. After all, in a town like ours, it’s best to keep your vices—your underage drinking and late-night fumbling in the back seat—as far from prying eyes as possible.
But mostly it was a miracle because of who I am all on my own. If you were to ask around about Miss Ruth Cornier, you’d hear the same story: Miss Ruth Cornier, they’d tell you, is a good God-fearing girl, not a lick of trouble, raised by two upstanding, cane-wielding pillars of the community. But intensely shy to the point of muteness, to the point of not being able to function when spoken to, a girl who grows red-faced and stuttering upon too forward a glance. A wisp of a girl, someone who haunts the background of photographs, unlikely to look a boy in the eyes, let alone date one.
And they were right. I was shy. But mostly I was lonely. While everyone respected my parents, they also feared them—especially my father, who held the power to damn sinners to Hell and used it frequently. My mother held a different kind of power: she was nearly as quiet as I was, at least in public. But in private her judgment was harsh, her tongue legendary, her whisper campaigns the kind that saw entire families shunned from potlucks and Sunday services over a single member’s wrongdoing. If anyone in Bottom Springs assumed life inside the Cornier house was different—that within the private walls of our two-story clapboard, the three of us shared a special familial intimacy, that my parents granted me a leniency and tenderness they gave no one else, the kind of loving indulgence a mother might give a naughty child who’s snagged a sucker from the grocery store—they would be wrong. There were moments of tenderness when I was young, evenings when my father would allow me to rest my head on his knee while he read, mornings when my mother’s fingers would soften and slow as they combed through my hair, but these were fleeting moments, dandelion seeds in my palm, lost the second I stopped clutching. For the most part there was no one my parents watched closer than me, looking for any hint of immorality or wantonness. And when they found one, there was no person on earth they would send to Hell quicker, Hell being twelve lashes with my father’s rattan cane, followed by a week locked inside my bedroom.
It was therefore wise to be a wisp. Even if my severe quietness meant that at school, I was as unpopular and friendless as poor Samuel Landry, whose Tourette’s syndrome made him a target for the crueler students, and Everett Duncan, whose ratty clothes, intense stare, and stubborn refusal to answer questions when called upon made it clear he was following in the footsteps of his ne’er-do-well father, one of the town’s chief church-shirkers. But it hardly mattered that no one invited me to drink Coors Light out in Starry Swamp on Saturdays. My whole life, I’d tried in timid overtures to find other people I could relate to, someone to call a friend, but I’d always failed. In such a small town, the pickings were slim. I wasn’t my parents’ kind of girl, not on the inside, but I wasn’t anyone else’s, either.
So instead of friendships, I cultivated quiet rebellions. Most came in the form of books. At Sacred Surrender High School, the library was tightly controlled by the church elders. It contained no suggestive books, no books that glorified sins like rebelling against one’s parents or sex before marriage. But most of all, it contained no occult. No boy or girl wizards or tales of monsters or werewolf love stories. The occult was a particular sticking point with my father. Because around here, the only belief system that had ever competed with religion was superstition; the only things parishioners had ever feared as much as God were the evils said to roam around us.
In fairness, Bottom Springs does look like the Creator had built it with the otherworldly in mind. Though I have only our neighboring towns to compare to, Forsythe and Trouville to the east and Houma to the north, I’ve always felt Bottom Springs must be the most beautiful place on earth. Here at the tip of Louisiana, it’s as if the sky and swamp and wild green trees know Holy Fire demands we lead staid, ascetic lives and try to make up for it, giving us all the splendor and decadence we aren’t supposed to want. Sunrises and sunsets are riots of color, the gulf sapphire blue, the black swamp laced with velvet-green lily pads, tall trees almost floating out of the depths. Trees everywhere, in fact: bending over dirt roads and bracing the shore and thick as a wall of sentries in the woods, dripping with Spanish moss. All this beauty stirs the soul, making one feel the pinprick presence of another order: God, perhaps, but maybe also something darker, secret beings with lives that unfold in the slivers between trees, whose slitted eyes blink open at night in the depths of the swamp, yellow and ancient as alligators’.
One story in particular has haunted Bottom Springs for as long as anyone can remember. It tells of a creature whose true name is so hoary and evil that men’s minds can’t contain it, and so we call him the Low Man. Cursed to remain trapped in Bottom Springs by men who practiced spiritual magics now long forgotten, the Low Man slumbers for all eternity in the deep, dark heart of the swamp, in a place no trapper or hunter has ever set foot. Every few years, the story goes, he wakes and rises from his underwater tomb to roam Bottom Springs, searching for a way out, seeking to be let loose upon the world in order to devour it.
Furious at his imprisonment, the Low Man settles for devouring us instead. He takes the shape of a beautiful man, a trap for sinners as seductive as a coral snake’s bright rings. The Low Man can see into your heart, see your true wickedness, and once he’s marked you, whether it’s hours, days, or years later, one night he will slip in through your window. He’ll sink his fangs into your neck like a rough kiss and feast—not only on your body, dismembering the cage that contains you, but on your soul. There is no Heaven or Hell waiting for those slaughtered by the Low Man. Only the worst fate of all, which is nothingness, which is to be reduced to a sparkless, nerveless thing, a bag of flesh that rots and stinks and then ceases to exist.
While the myth of the Low Man had fallen out of regular mention by the time I grew up, men still told stories after they’d had a few too many Wild Turkeys at the Blue Moon bar, describing how they’d seen him slip into the shadows between houses when they were young, felt his cold presence when they ventured too deep into the swamp. Children still checked the locks on their windows before they went to bed and stared hard at any man with a face too close to beautiful. And the threat of something old and hungry in the swamp lent an extra sense of thrill to the parties teenagers threw there. Once, I’d wondered which scared the people of Bottom Springs more: the Low Man or the Devil.
This, of course, was a problem for my father, who felt God should have the monopoly on fear. So the school library was tightly restricted, youths’ minds protected, and that meant it was no place for me. But in the town library—a small brick building off Main Street with a roof steepled like a church—sometimes an illicit book would find its way in. One of my greatest blessings was that the library was perpetually underfunded. Without a healthy budget, it relied on donations, often cardboard boxes stuffed with bent paperbacks and the occasional stray T-shirt meant for Goodwill. Even more occasionally, parishioners would forget to scour through their stacks to take out anything damning. By the time I turned fourteen, I’d gotten my hands on a Danielle Steel and the second and fifth Percy Jacksons that way, all haphazardly pulled out of donation boxes and stuck onto the shelves.
While the librarians were sometimes careless, I was always alert, books being my only lifeline. I was as hungry for stories as the Low Man was for souls, devouring every book that wasn’t a spiritual, each one proof another world existed outside the one I knew. I believe at one point, I’d read every book available in town. I used to smile at how misguided my father was, thinking the classics he allowed—Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations and The Age of Innocence—had nothing to teach about rebellion. I learned to question and rage and self-immolate over love alongside Heathcliff and Pip and Newland Archer.
And then I found Twilight.
The copy was wedged into a shelf of spy novels. It was a miracle I happened to spot it. A miracle I had the courage to take it to the farthest corner of the library and read it in the shadows, chapter by chapter, returning day after day since I could never check it out. It was the ultimate contraband: a story both occult and romantic, and meant for girls like me. In Bella, I found a mirror. We were both shy and overlooked, with the smallest of lives, hemmed in by circumstances outside our control. And in the vampire Edward, I found everything I’d ever wanted in a man. He loved Bella with single-minded devotion, a self-effacing passion beyond anything a human man was capable of. That’s in turn how I loved him. I read the novel five times in the span of a month, then spent months after fruitlessly searching the stacks for the sequel teased at the end. Eventually, I committed the crime of shoving the book in my backpack and bringing it home. At the time, it was the worst thing I’d ever done. The night I stole it, I woke at midnight in a cold sweat, sure the Low Man or at least my father would come hunting for me.
Twilight was the bridge to my second rebellion: an obsession with the kind of love my father rarely talked about in church. The kind where you felt all the overwhelming awe you were supposed to feel for Jesus, but for another person. It fascinated me. Though I prayed to God every night and believed he was listening, I’d never felt particularly close. I’d never felt close to another person, either. And of the two connections, I wished for the person more. Ruth Cornier, the preacher’s daughter, coveted a boy’s love more than God’s. That was another secret I hid in my muteness.
I found Twilight at fourteen. By the time I was seventeen, there was no girl in the world more willing to be consumed by love. I even had a favorite daydream. My hair—long, wavy, and copper—was the one thing about me worth attention. It was unprecedented in our family, mine alone. I used to imagine a boy combing his hands through it, letting the curls loop around his fingers like rings, binding us together. He would whisper that it was beautiful—not me, necessarily, not my round, freckled face, but my hair. And then he would kiss me. I told myself if life could just give me that—one moment to feel lovely, a single, perfect kiss—I would never ask for more.
So the Sunday a new face cropped up in the pews, I took notice.
