Ghost in the Grove

by Frank Reddy

220 pages, Paperback

Published July 14, 2026

Reviews

[D.C. Phillips]

Ghost in the Grove is a worthy spiritual successor to suspenseful Southern Gothic classics such as A Good Man is Hard to Find and Night of the Hunter; in it, Frank Reddy masterfully illustrates the soul-shaking impact of unfettered religious zeal--for better or horrifyingly worse.

[From The Reader’s Nest]

Really great book dealing with multiple levels of threats, secrets, classism, religious control, all in the Deep South.

[Jim]

This book hooked me from the get-go.
I got the eerie feeling that the author didn’t fetch his rich characters and riveting tale from imagination, but rather, as if he’d surely lived it all himself – and what a wonderful, darkly-twisted story it is!
Full of snake-handling, revival-tent glory bent by sickly desires, the story vividly winds along lost highways of the crumbling Old South. Tinged with a faint whiff of Vienna Sausages and cheap perfume, the tale echoes with distant rakes across a rinky-dink piano and the shouting of stacked-hair preachers who long ago sowed the seeds of the coming, terrible harvest of reckoning.
Great book!

[Cameron Bogan]

I was honored to be an early recipient/ARC of the manuscript on this one.

To be spoiler-free:

Reddy plays around with time, religion, and memory in this southern backwoods tale. His language is King-ian, themes in the realm of Pizzolatto, and a setting like that of O’Connor.

The characters are especially memorable, and Frank is just doing his best work here. It would make for an excellent screen adaptation. Excited to see where he goes from here.