Festival of the Rougarou: A Southern Gothic Horror

Festival of the Rougarou

When fog lifts off Bayou Blanc, the pumps under Crowley thrum like something breathing—and the bell at St. Mary’s forgets its numbers. Festival week is coming: banners ironed flat, porches scrubbed, money promised. The town means to look respectable. The water remembers otherwise.

René Broussard, a reporter who burned his byline, comes home for a simple storm piece and stumbles into clean drag marks on a muddy bank, glass beads salted through the reeds, and a string of knots where no child’s hand should have tied it. Colette Boudreaux keeps the schedule tight enough to hide a tremor. Sheriff Guidry keeps the optics tidy. Deputy Bernard keeps seeing what doesn’t fit. And on Granny Fontenot’s porch, a cracked bell offers the only good counsel left.

The rules are old and plain: it counts the knots; a bell rung by hand cuts hunger; paper won’t save you. Between parish law and bayou law stands a smooth-voiced developer selling the town by the acre—and something in the fog that doesn’t read contracts.

What it’s about

A lyrical, high-tension Southern Gothic thriller about belief and denial, civic ritual and old ritual, and the debts a community owes to the water that built it. As festival week edges toward a storm, Crowley must decide which law it trusts: the ordinance or the bell rope.

Why you’ll love it

Lean, propulsive chapters: every scene ends in movement—decision, discovery, or danger.

Atmosphere you can taste: humid nights, failing bells, knotted string ritual, pumps droning like a drowned metronome.

Adult protagonists with agency: capable people making hard choices under pressure—no passengers.

Folklore with teeth: the rougarou isn’t a costume; it’s a rule set. The book treats myth like physics.

Civic stakes that feel real: optics, liability, emergency powers, and how “policy” can become a spell.