A River Wide
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A River Wide
by Amanda J. McGee Mountains have deep, dark hearts, and those hearts are carved by water. Deep in the shadowed hollers of Appalachia, Rhia Blackburn has always kept her powers and her heart buried. Around here, the river whispers dark secrets, the earth remembers every cut, and survival is a skill women pass down in blood. But when her cousin Amey is kidnapped up the mountain, Rhia is forced to confront the terror of her home and her own troubled history. To save her, Rhia must trust her powers—and herself—because in Appalachia, family comes first and water always finds a way. An Appalachian horror novella about family, grief, and the stubborn strength it takes to survive. About the Author
Amanda J. McGee is a planner by day and a writer by night. She has degrees from Hollins University and Virginia Tech, where she studied languages, identity politics, policy, and infrastructure. She is the author of the dark epic fantasy series The Creation Saga and is an Art Matters Grant recipient, a program of the City of Roanoke and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novella Viridian was published in the anthology A Sinister Quartet, which made the 2020 Locus Recommended Reading List. A River Wide is her debut standalone novella. About the Cover Artist Dante Luiz is an illustrator and occasional writer from an island in southern Brazil. He’s the interior artist for Crema (comiXology/Dark Horse), and his work with comics has also appeared in anthologies, like Wayward Kindred (TO Comix Press), Mañana: Latinx Comics From the 25th Century (Power & Magic Press), and Shout Out (TO Comix Press), among others. Find him online on Twitter and Instagram (@dntlz), or his website (danteluiz.com). Praise for A RIVER WIDE “An Appalachian murder ballad for the twenty-first century, Amanda McGee’s nail-biter of a novella shows us why it’s dangerous to be a witch and dangerous to cross one. At the same time, A River Wide overflows with joys and sorrows that arise from the deep blood ties of family, drawing from profound wells of grief and hope to brew a ghost-haunted spell.” —Mike Allen, World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson award-nominated author of Trail of Shadows “A River Wide pulled me in with narrator Rhia's vivid voice, a small town's secrets, and a kind of elemental witchcraft I hadn't seen before. Rather than bend water to her will, Rhia must work with it, sometimes even bargain with it—and she can't take that lightly, even when what she's bargaining for amounts to her sister's life. I hope McGee has more plans for the witches of the Blackburn family and the Appalachian home they so lovingly, so precariously, inhabit.” —Laura Blackwell, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author “Like Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, and Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, Amanda J. McGee’s novella A River Wide taps the bonds of sisterhood, survival, and power, and floods the senses with river water and witchcraft. McGee’s characters have a deep, Dillard-esque, and—dare I say—holy bond with the Appalachian landscape, which can be capricious, cruel, generous, or tender in turns, much like the prose itself. A River Wide wanders deftly into various creeks and hollows of genre: thriller, ghost story, romance, family drama, and a middle-of-life coming-of-age. It moved me, deeply.” —C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter |
