Enjoy the spooky vibes of two Southern gothic debuts

It’s set in the small town of Blacknot, North Carolina, where main character Jesse Calloway has recently returned after swearing he’d never come back when he left for college a year earlier. Unbeknownst to his Aunt Nancy, who raised him, he’s back at the urging of a mysterious character named Cat who sends him cryptic texts suggesting they know something about the death of his mother, Connie. Eighteen years earlier, she was found dead on the banks of the Miskwa River, with toddler Jesse by her side. How she got there and what happened to her have remained a mystery ever since.

With prompts from Cat, Jesse sets out to find some answers, including just who Cat is, while navigating life in the small, backwoods town where being gay can be unsafe. Adding to the mystery are alternating chapters set three years before Connie’s death, told from the perspective of Alice, an emotionally unstable young woman with witchy ways. How she relates to Jesse’s story is one more piece of the puzzle in “Red Rabbit Ghost.”

A deceased mother also figures prominently in “Girls with Long Shadows” (Harper, $27.99), the debut novel of Texas author Tennessee Hill. It centers on three pretty teenage girls, identical triplets who look exactly like their mother, who died giving birth to them. Named Baby A, B and C, they are raised by their Gram and work at her golf course, the Bayou Bloom, in the small town of Longshadow, Texas.

Credit: Claire McAdams

Credit: Claire McAdams

No one in town can tell the tall, thin, blue-eyed blondes apart, and they’re so connected that if one of them injures herself, the others can feel it. But their personalities are very different. Baby C is into astrology and psychics and believes she can predict the future. Baby A is quick to anger and prone to inflicting harm on herself and others, if provoked. Baby B, who narrates the novel, is a late bloomer who grows alienated from the others when they start exploring their sexuality and developing romantic relationships.

Identity is a major theme in “Girls with Long Shadows” — how one defines it and how others perceive it. Woven throughout the novel are brief, interstitial passages labeled “Front Porch Chorus” that provide context and fill in the backstory on the sisters’ mother from the collective perspective of the townspeople.

As the girls’ courting rituals ramp up over the course of the summer, the sisters learn some hard lessons about how interchangeable they may be in the eyes of certain boys in town. In the process, betrayals are committed, jealousies are unleashed and divisiveness grows, threatening to destroy the triplets’ bond and possibly one or more of their lives.

Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.