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Writer's pictureKim Beall

Oh, yeah: Seven Turns

Early concept front-cover art showed a narrow blacktop road winding away into the trees

my Facebook page but I should begin at the beginning here, too. Seven Turns is a ghost story. No, wait, it's a love story. Well, it's kind of a cozy mystery, too. And it definitely has elements of fantasy, but in a modern setting. I'm having a hell of a time pegging it to a genre. This tale doesn't want to be good and get in the box. And, you know what? I love it so much, I'm not really trying very hard to make it do so. This story is about Callaghan McCarthy. Her friends call her Cally. She's an author, or, well, she was. She wrote a novel once, a ghost story that turned out to be very popular, but that was years ago, and she needs to come up with a sequel, soon, or else break down and go back to editing technical documents for a living. She has piled everything she owns into her car and set off across the country to seek inspiration at a bed and breakfast she's been told is haunted. She doesn't actually believe in ghosts, mind you. The ghosts who haunt Vale House find this very amusing. They have been expecting her, and they need her help with a problem of their own. As Cally comes to know and love the eccentric denizens of the run-down southern town the locals call Woodley, USA, she begins to realize she has wandered into the middle of a host of secrets nobody will talk about in front of people who are Not From Around Here. While a disembodied internet entity and the ghost of a teenage Taino pirate attempt to help her understand her new role among them, she must prevent a murder, a fire, and the exploitation the innkeeper's sweet mentally ill daughter, all while navigating a world of ghosts and faeries without whose help she will not succeed. All this she must do while struggling to hold onto - or must she let go of? - her sanity. BTW: Here is some of my internal agonizing about how to title this tale.

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