Andrew Clark will visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, September 20th at 3:00pm to share his new novel, WHERE DARK THINGS RISE, in conversation with Emily Nasser-Hall.
Sixteen-year-old Mina is frustrated by Daddy’s drinking, her mom’s fanatical religious beliefs, and growing up poor in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Most of her teachers assume she won’t amount to much despite her 4.0 GPA, and the country club guys think she’s easy prey. But they don’t know Mina’s dark secret: She can control a magical force of supernatural creatures known as the Shadow Faces.
Mina doesn’t want powers. All she wants to do is escape the trailer park for a leafy college campus far away. But when her crush, Gabe, is stalked by a shapeshifting preacher/wolf, Mina learns to use her powers to protect him. Mina soon discovers the same preacher is trafficking teens for a mystical brothel and has kidnapped her best friend, Erin, after a failed attempt at conversion therapy. Can Mina use the Shadow Faces to save Erin and the other kids without losing her chance at a normal life?
Andrew K. Clark is a writer from Western North Carolina where his people settled before the Revolutionary War. His debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow, was released by Cowboy Jamboree Press in September of 2024 and is a winner of an IPPY from the Independent Book Publisher’s Awards. The sequel, Where Dark Things Rise, was published by Quill & Crow Publishing House in September of 2025. His poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer was published by Main Street Rag Press and shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Award. His work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review, The Wrath Bearing Tree, and many other journals. He received his MFA from Converse College. Connect with him at andrewkclark.com.
Emily Naser-Hall is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Western Carolina University. Her research focuses on cultural and legal narratives of sexuality, femininity, and privacy post-1945 American literature and film. She has published on the works of Shirley Jackson, Gothic domesticity, sexuality, and gendered labor, with a forthcoming project on the Gothic frontier in American folk horror.
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