AVALON MOON by Michael Amos Cody #AuthorInterview

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. . . .

***

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.

Catch Up With Michael Amos Cody:

MichaelAmosCody.com
Amazon Author Profile
Goodreads
Instagram – @michaelamoscody
Threads – @michaelamoscody
X – @DrMacOde
Facebook – @MacOde77
Facebook – @michaelamoscody
BlueSky – @michaelamoscody.bsky.social

Q&A with MICHAEL AMOS CODY

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
I was born in the Air Force hospital at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina, and grew up in the village of Walnut, jewel of Madison County, North Carolina, not far from the ruins of Runion, a place I have reimagined for my fiction. I spent my high school days in bands—high school band by day, chicken coop rock band by night—and after a couple of years studying music (flute) at Mars Hill College, I left for Nashville and worked throughout the 1980s as a songwriter, eventually hearing my songs recorded by Glen Campbell, Gary Morris, and others, including myself. After reuniting with my seventh-grade sweetheart and marrying her in 1989, I returned to school, where I stayed throughout the 1990s, earning my BA at the University of North Carolina at Asheville (1993), my MA at Western Carolina University (1995), and my PhD at the University of South Carolina, Columbia (2000). I focused most of my energy during those years and the following decade and a half (2000-2014) on scholarship and academic publishing, which have been important for my career as a professor of literature. But after I achieved my final promotion, I returned my writing brain full time to fiction. Twenty-five years after it was begun at UNCA, I finished and published my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook in 2017. Then, twenty-five years after it was begun at WCU, I finished and published my short story collection A Twilight Reel in 2021. Since then, I’ve picked up the pace and published two more novels: Streets of Nashville in 2025 and Avalon Moon in 2026. At this point, I’ve been married to Leesa, that seventh-grade sweetheart, for thirty-seven years, and I’ve taught literature and writing at East Tennessee State University for twenty-five years. Leesa and I live in Jonesborough, a small town in the east Tennessee foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

What was the inspiration for this book?
Avalon Moon came together through gathering threads of a variety of my interests and influences. We often hear the writing advice to “write what you know.” One piece of advice I’ve also run across a lot is “write what you want to read.” This novel grew from a combining of those wisdom pearls. Avalon Moon’s wild and small-town Appalachian settings are near and dear to me—the mystery of the place, its landscape and history, the people who live there, Appalachian life’s struggle to engage with the complexities of the global village, and so on. These are things I know. As for how the story grew from my desire not only to write it but also to read it, I’ve always had a fascination with the mysterious, with mysticism, with the Gothic. I’ve always been drawn to wolves and mountains and monsters (although I don’t claim to be a horror fan). My years of study in early American and U.S. literature (from Indigenous mythology through the nineteenth century) have given me a rich love of the language across those centuries and cultures. So, I wanted to read about a mystical Appalachian woman like Livvy Goforth and her strange powers. I wanted to read about a character like Ariel Anderson, and I wanted to hear her voice. I’ve dealt a lot in my academic work with old manuscripts, so I had a lot of fun including one of those in this story. One inciting image that could be identified as an inspiration for the novel was the apple orchard I passed every day on my commute to and from my MA studies at Western Carolina University; apple trees when dormant and naked in winter look creepy. Add to this the info-nugget I ran across at some point that one meaning of the word Avalon—that is, King Arthur’s Avalon—is “secret island of apples,” and I was off and running.

Can you give us a glimpse into the research that went into writing this story?
I researched a lot of things during the writing of Avalon Moon: the Pantisocratic society that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (early English Romantics) imagined founding in the new U.S., but never followed through with; wolf sanctuaries; the business of running a small apple orchard; the business of running a weekly rural newspaper; contemporary worship of the Greek goddess Artemis. One of my favorite research projects for the novel has to do with the manuscript Ariel discovers in the attic of Avalon Cottage. It’s a two-hundred-year-old document (supposedly) written by Charles Brockden Brown (1770-1810), often cited as the U.S.’s first novelist. While Brown is relatively unknown today, his work influenced U.S. writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe and English writers like Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. During a significant portion of my career as a scholar, I studied Brown’s writing and worked with a group of Brown scholars to make all his work more widely available. That project is finished and available now in a searchable database (as an electronic archive at https://brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/). When I was drafting what is supposed to be Brown’s short history of his time visiting the Avalon community during the autumn of 1800, I would think about what I wanted his narrative to say. I could write it out in my language (with already a fairly good feel for Brown’s voice), then go to the archive and research if Brown was more likely to use one word or another. For example, would Brown be more likely to use the word inappropriate or its synonym incongruous; a check of the archive revealed that Brown used incongruous twenty-three times in his writing and seems never to have used inappropriate even once.

What does your typical writing routine look like? Any idiosyncrasies or rituals?
I do my best to write most every day. When I’m in the heat of drafting a novel, I try to write around seven hundred fifty words a session. I can’t always do that, what with life and teaching responsibilities, but when I can, a story grows quickly. As much as I would like to be one of those writers who can silence the internal editor-critic, I’m not. I find it difficult to leave a sentence or paragraph that isn’t as good—or as close to good—as I can write it in that moment. This makes for slow drafting, which can be frustrating, but it also leads, usually, to first drafts that need little fixing and are ready for enriching revision. I can’t listen to music while I’m writing; I’ll listen to the music instead of writing. But I don’t like it quiet either (old rock-and-roll ears ring constantly), so I either have a fan running or a brown noise playlist going on Spotify. I often stand while I write; I’m standing now. As for idiosyncrasies, I guess the main one is that I write on a blue screen with white letters. When I first started writing fiction, I was using Word Perfect for DOS (if anybody is still familiar with that). When Microsoft Word became the word processor at work (and thus at home), I tried to create on the white page with black characters, but that didn’t feel right. So, whenever I start a novel or short story, I change the page color to “blueberry” and the font to white. Then I’m ready to write!

Are you currently working on your next novel? If so, can you share a little about it?
I just finished the fourth draft of my fourth novel, the working title of which is Jacob’s Limp. It’s a sequel to my second novel Streets of Nashville and the second in a planned three-novel series featuring songwriter Ezra MacRae. Jacob’s Limp takes place four years after the story of Streets. Ezra is no longer the struggling songwriter cleaning pools to pay the bills but a published (and paid) songwriter already achieving moderate success. While the specter of the killer who nearly ended Ezra’s life and dreams in Streets still haunts the story, a new figure with apparently malicious but known intentions has begun to stalk Ezra. Whereas in Streets, Ezra is a very social young man, often out with friends and coworkers, Ezra’s life in Jacob’s Limp, although professionally successful, seems much more isolated and claustrophobic, as he has lost—for various reasons—much of the social circle he had four years before.

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