Roads

by Daren Dean

Fifteen-year-old Dannie Gail Posey is a small-town girl with dreams of escaping her roots on Posey Hill. When the Glencairn Sheriff brings home her now catatonic older sister, Carley, who has fallen victim to abuse by someone in the infamous Lynch family—Dannie’s world is shaken to its core. When the Sheriff and even her Uncle Smith Posey, known and feared since his youth, concede there’s nothing to be done, Dannie struggles with the injustice of it all and vows to make it right. She charges her Uncle Smith with the responsibility of confronting the worst Lynch of them all, Russell Lynch.

The dark country roads of Cote Sans Dessein county keep their secrets hidden with a smothering embrace. Roads is a powerful story of revenge, justice, salvation, retribution. Dannie discovers an inner strength in a family that seems to hold no one dear. This is a tale that will tear you up worse than the chorus from an old religious hymn.

With the same grit and gothic prose of his recent works, The Black Harvest and This Vale of Tears , that have earned him praise as "The poet laureate of fallen angels" (Robert Olen Butler), Daren Dean has written an indelible story that stays with the reader like a neck tattoo. Not since Dorothy Allison’s Bone or Larry Brown’s Fay , have we seen such a fierce young woman.

Cowboy Jamboree Press
good grit lit.

321 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2023

About the author

Daren Dean is the author of the novel Far Beyond the Pale (2015) , I'll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone: Stories (2019), The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War (2021), and This Vale of Tears (2021). ROADS (2023). Of Roads, Ron Rash wrote, "From the opening page, Daren Dean propels the reader into his story and never taps the brakes as his characters move toward an inevitable reckoning. Dannie Gail Posey is the novel’s young heroine, and we cheer her on as she navigates a violent world that seeks to entrap her even as she dreams of escaping it. Roads confirms Daren Dean as an important new voice in rural noir." In 2025 he had three works published, The New Salvation (CJ Press), Lovesick (Louisiana Literature Press), and Shelter Me (A novel of the 2016 Louisiana Flood) Livingston Press.