David Binder is a young, successful writer living in Chicago and suffering from writer’s block. He stares at the blank page, and the blank page stares back—until inspiration strikes in the form of a ghost story that captivated him as a child.
With his pregnant wife and young daughter in tow, he sets out to explore the myth of Virginia Beale, Faery Queen of the Haunted Dell. But as his investigation takes him deeper and deeper into the legacy of blood and violence that casts its shadow over the old Beale farm, Binder finds himself obsessed with a force that’s as wicked as it is seductive.
A stirring literary rendition of Tennessee’s famed Curse of the Bell Witch, Little Sister Death skilfully toes the line between Southern Gothic and horror, and further cements William Gay’s legacy as not only one of the South’s finest writers, but among the best that American literature has to offer.
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As his friend Tom Franklin notes in the intimate introduction with which Little Sister Death begins, the late, great William Gay's lost horror novel "is the most metafictional thing [he] ever wrote—it's about a writer, obsessed with a haunting, who moves his family to the site" (p.xvii) of said unearthly events.
Gay, for his part, didn't go quite as far as that, but he had "long been fascinated with the Bell Witch phenomenon in Tennessee, and even had his own encounter with, perhaps, an echo of the Bell Witch herself." (pp.xvi-xvii) That true tale acts at a capstone on the unsettling story at the centre of Little Sister Death, but there's a goodly amount of truth, too, in the several hundred posthumously published pages preceding the author's authentic account of his own eerie experience.
Like William Gay, whose fearsome first novel won the 1989 James A. Michener Memorial Prize, the debut of Little Sister Death's central character David Binder is something of a success. Not necessarily commercially—it's no bestseller—but it wins enough awards to keep Binder and his kin in business.
Sadly, the critically acclaimed young author's second novel does not cement his literary legacy in the way Provinces of Night did in Gay's case. Instead, it's rejected, and rather than redrafting the manuscript, a briefly defeated Binder takes his agent's advice to "write a genre novel [...] something we can sell to the paperback house" (p.22) to heart. A trip to his local bookstore later, he has his subject: the Beale Haunting—Gay's thinly veiled rendition of the so-called Curse of the Bell Witch, which, for what it's worth, The Blair Witch Project is believed to have been based on.
Gay, for his part, didn't go quite as far as that, but he had "long been fascinated with the Bell Witch phenomenon in Tennessee, and even had his own encounter with, perhaps, an echo of the Bell Witch herself." (pp.xvi-xvii) That true tale acts at a capstone on the unsettling story at the centre of Little Sister Death, but there's a goodly amount of truth, too, in the several hundred posthumously published pages preceding the author's authentic account of his own eerie experience.
Like William Gay, whose fearsome first novel won the 1989 James A. Michener Memorial Prize, the debut of Little Sister Death's central character David Binder is something of a success. Not necessarily commercially—it's no bestseller—but it wins enough awards to keep Binder and his kin in business.
Sadly, the critically acclaimed young author's second novel does not cement his literary legacy in the way Provinces of Night did in Gay's case. Instead, it's rejected, and rather than redrafting the manuscript, a briefly defeated Binder takes his agent's advice to "write a genre novel [...] something we can sell to the paperback house" (p.22) to heart. A trip to his local bookstore later, he has his subject: the Beale Haunting—Gay's thinly veiled rendition of the so-called Curse of the Bell Witch, which, for what it's worth, The Blair Witch Project is believed to have been based on.