The Devils Daughter (The Devil Steps Back)

Velmoor is not a city so much as a wound in the earth that learned to dress itself in beauty. It sits in the southeastern belly of Louisiana, past the parishes that appear on maps and just before the parishes that do not — a place where the cartographers' pencils grew uncertain and their courage failed them. The streets of Velmoor's old quarter are laid in the French colonial style, their iron balconies heavy with bougainvillea gone dark from too much moisture and too little light. The architecture is antebellum in bone, Gothic in spirit — buildings that stand slightly too tall for their foundations, doorways that arch with a hunger that is almost architectural in its elegance. Read more