Moonshine: An Introduction

COVER ART BY THE MAJESTIC LESIA T

I came up with the idea for my latest book back in 2021. I had a dream that I was lounging around a cinema, looking for time to kill, and the big film that summer was about a George-Wallace-esque Governor in the Civil Rights era who was also a werewolf. When I woke up, the idea and its blockbuster, cinematic appeal stayed with me.

Now, you could throw some armchair psychology in there and say that I was more of a film fan than a writer or a reader and this idea was meant for the silver screen. Not so. I based the book off To Kill a Mockingbird with its opening sentence a wink, wink to that book's opening. This book would not so much be Southern Gothic as Southern Horror. That autumn, as I listened to Randy Newman's classic "Good Ol' Boys" the idea festered inside of me. To say it blossomed would do a disservice to the ugliness of the ideology, at least in the Scarlet segment.

I can appreciate some people won't like the Angie segment, in which I write from the perspective of a black Muslim girl. You know what, bring on the criticism. If I had left the book with Scarlet, it would once again be a story of racism seen through white eyes with the white people being the heroes. I wanted to write a powerful black character and I did. We can have the whole debate about me writing from the character's perspective. I welcome it. It's not blackface; I'm not mocking the character's skin via 19th century stagecraft. Instead I'm writing their story from their perspective. I did the research. I looked into Afro-Caribbean culture in the Deep South.