From the author of Kinetic Blue comes Palm Beach Gothic, a novel-in-stories of Southern Gothic gone Floridian, with affectionate portraits of subtropical eccentricity.
Along Dixie Highway, where Palm Beach's gilded world ends and something rawer begins, elegance adjoins ruin. Palm Beach Gothic moves from the Covid-policed beaches of California to the polo fields of Wellington, from the sashay of Key West drag queens to a megachurch service built on smoke machines and selective scripture, from moss-draped Savannah - gothic in the old, literal sense - to a Florida gothic all its own, all orbiting the gravitational center of the pink The Colony Hotel on Palm Beach Island, with its spectral leprechauns and disappearing monkeys, and the dive bar "Mad's," miles south with a bright red door.
At the heart of the collection is the novella "Palm Beach Gothic: A Tale of Midnight on Dixie Highway," where a glamorous, sardonic drag performer known as Miss Aperitif holds court among an ensemble of loyalists, misfits, and colonizers, until a rainy Pride night ends in violence no one will acknowledge and grief no one quite knows how to perform. These stories blend biting satire and empathy to explore who we are in private-and what we owe others when the people we love are gone.