AVALON MOON
by Michael Amos Cody
August 24 - September 18, 2026 Virtual Book Tour
Synopsis:
In Avalon Moon, a local man has gone missing and then is soon found dead in a highland meadow, side-by-side with an unknown woman. When another man and woman go missing and a female deputy is found murdered, Gabriel Tanner, editor of Runion’s weekly newspaper, and Plumer Reeves, a reclusive local hawkshaw working for the niece of the first dead man, suspect a monster is hunting in their western North Carolina mountains. Two extraordinary young women, the Avalon community’s Ariel Anderson and Lonesome Mountain’s Livvy Goforth, join Tanner and Reeves to lead the attempt to discover and stop the killer.
Praise for Avalon Moon:
"With wolves across the river and murder in the high meadow, Avalon Moon knows exactly how to raise the hair on your neck. Move it to the top of your book queue."
~ BestThrillers.com
"A deliciously gothic tale stitched into a brutal murder mystery. As a serial killer stalks the mountains of North Carolina, Cody’s precise language shifts effortlessly like light through the trees – from lush gothic poetry to gritty Appalachian realism. Facing ancient gods and hungry beasts in the deep woods, the reader can’t help but dread a darker truth: evil is only ever a breath away."
~ Andrew K. Clark, author of Where Dark Things Grow
"A crime novel featuring a new entry to the list of Most Bone-Chilling Fictional Serial Killers ever committed to paper. Or to e-book. Whatever. The influence of Poe and Hawthorne, at their bone-chilling creepiest, can be felt egging on the unfolding of the story, one eerie development after another. A taut, skillfully crafted thriller."
~ Whiskey Leavins, author of Low Angle Shot
"Avalon Moon relies on vivid, inviting storytelling and precise language to lure you in, and once you’re caught in Cody’s prodigious literary talents, it’s hard to escape. . . . A book you’ll think about long after you’ve finished the story on the page."
~ Bobby Mathews, author of Magic City Blues
"The Appalachian town of Runion is threatened by a serial killer, wolves, and ghosts—literal and figurative—in Michael Amos Cody’s propulsive new novel, Avalon Moon. The tension and constant sense of danger kept me turning the pages, but the heart of the book is the large cast of believable characters. All are rendered with insight, compassion, and humor, and they continued to linger in my thoughts long after the novel’s satisfying conclusion."
~ Peter McDade, author of King Cal
Book Details:
Genre: Psychological Horror, Thriller
Published by: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Number of Pages: 340
ISBN: 9781963695670 (ISBN10: 1963695674)
Book Links: Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | BookShop.org | Goodreads | BookBub | Madville Publishing
Read an excerpt:
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
One
Gabriel Tanner
“Editor of and chief contributor to a country weekly” never made my top ten list of things I wanted to be when I grew up. For the longest time, I had only one item on that list—Rock Star! I toyed with adding a second item, maybe being just a hit-making songwriter, but the songwriting I did throughout the 1980s was so closely bound up with the Rock Star! idea that I couldn’t pull the two apart. If I didn’t become the next Bruce Springsteen, which I didn’t, I was unlikely to become the next Bob McDill—ditto on the didn’t.
So, with the Rock Star! phase of my life gone grumbling into my dreams, I left Nashville in the hot gut of August 1990, retreated, tail between legs, to Runion, my hometown in the North Carolina mountains, and the following January entered Runion State University, where I double-majored in English and Journalism. I took a part-time job as student reporter and all-around grunt for Sheldon Dean’s Runion Recorder. A couple years after I graduated, Sheldon decided he was tired of writing and offered me a full-time position as editor, keeping only the title of “General Manager” for himself. I accepted.
And so it came to pass that on a cold evening in early March, on the darker side of twilight, I drove toward the Lonesome Mountain end of Genesis Road, planning to swing around the back way into Runion. On regular mornings going to work, or any other time I was in a hurry, I drove down to the French Broad end of Genesis and took the river road up a short hill and onto Main Street, but I was dreading two hours minimum of sitting in a meeting at the Madison County Cooperative Extension Office complex, housed in the recently renovated Old Mill on Mill Street, and taking notes for a regular report to appear in next week’s paper. The room would be stuffy with heat and humanity, and to be honest, I was lollygagging.
This year’s March was looking like a lion-lamb version—in like a lion, out like a lamb. We expected to wake up the next morning to some serious snow and ice courtesy of Winter Storm Ulysses. The fields on my left and the woods on my right seemed to hold their breath in anticipation.
I rolled to a stop at the T-intersection where Genesis Road dead-ends at Jewel Hill Road, with Lonesome Mountain ahead and to my left, dark against the sky. My new Honda hybrid sat quietly, and still not used to its workings, I thought it might have died but relaxed when no warning lights appeared. Even though the temperature was in the upper thirties, I opened my windows and—with no other traveler sitting at my bumper and politely honking, as our mountain folk do—sat at the intersection with my eyes closed and my skin alive to the chilly air. I heard a few of last summer’s still-tethered leaves shivering in the boughs overhead and something scurrying through the underbrush in the woods off to my right. I think I could’ve engaged the emergency brake and gone to sleep, but I opened my eyes, suddenly uneasy and unsure why.
The headlights shown across Jewel Hill Road and lit the lower part of a hillside pasture beyond. A few head of cattle midway up the slope stood at the edge of the light and grazed on pale grass.
Not one to be unnerved by a bovine presence in the twilight, I strained my senses to catch and identify what raised hairs along my forearms and around the back of my neck.
To my left, a field rolled away in successive swells toward a wooded ridge standing blackly against the sky. Runion lay on the other side of that ridge, but somewhere between the town and me, yips and cries rose from the gathering dark. These joined together into an eerie howl of various voices that twisted around one another, broke apart, and swelled together again.
Coyotes.
When I was growing up in these mountains, coyotes existed only in old TV westerns. But they were voice-over actors only, strictly behind-the-scenes. They were soundtrack features. Technicians of ambiance. Nothing said a cowboy was alone in the darkening wilderness like the distant howl of a coyote. The cowboy would raise his eyes from the campfire and sit still and listen for a moment, alert to the wild. But it was never the coyote itself that frightened him. Maybe the coyote’s cry was a reminder of his loneliness and vulnerability—that if such a critter could be out there in the dark, then anything could be out there.
But in recent years, coyotes had loped out of the faded glory of Hollywood’s western and into our world, maybe crossing the Mississippi around Memphis and moving steadily east across Tennessee until they reached Appalachia and Runion. They were seen trotting along the edges of regional four-lanes or lying dead on twisting mountain highways. They stole cats and small dogs just beyond the lights of back porches. That evening at the stop sign, they yipped and yapped and cried somewhere out on the verge of a Runion farmer’s field.
Still, I thought, at least they aren’t wolves. Wolves, of course, were a different story. Send up the howl of a wolf into the night, and the cowboy would become focused on the beast, not on loneliness or vulnerability. The wolf’s howl menaced, threatened. Eyes might shine at the edge of the campfire’s light, followed by snarling close-ups. Then enter the legend of the wolf mixed with a man, and the beast achieved cinematic glory, jumping genres from westerns to horror, something coyotes could never quite pull off.
When I pressed the accelerator, the Honda whispered to life, and I turned left toward town. If I sat there much longer, I would be late for the extension meeting, during which one item on the agenda just happened to be related to the beasts of my T-intersection musing. . . .
***
Excerpt from Avalon Moon by Michael Amos Cody. Copyright 2026 by Michael Amos Cody. Reproduced with permission from Michael Amos Cody. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
Michael Amos Cody is author of the 2017 novel GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK and the 2021 collection A TWILIGHT REEL, winner of the Short Story category in the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. His 2025 literary suspense novel STREETS OF NASHVILLE won the Thriller category in the 2026 Independent Press Awards. His new novel, released in May 2026, is the psychological thriller AVALON MOON. Cody lives with wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches early American literature and creative writing in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
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