The Bystanders is a dark yet humorous coming-of-age story set in the 1980s when big hair was big and MTV ruled the airwaves. Shannon Lamb's "Like a Virgin" and attitude and fashion choices, her fortune-teller mother, Wendy Samples, and her no-good, cheating, jobless stepfather, Dale Samples, result in Shannon finding few fans in the real town of Lawrencetown, MO. In a quiet town of annual picnics and beautiful landscapes, the Samples' rundown trailer and odd behaviors aren't charm...

Gothic Horror brings specific images to mind—crumbling castles, dark Parisian alleyways, mad wives in attics, dark and lonely moors, cathedrals where more evil than good exists. Georgia Gothic replaces those locations with antebellum plantations, creatures hidden in backyard sheds, rural folks who might or might not be making pacts with a variety of terrors because that's how it's always been done, city folks hiding their secrets in the trunks of their cars or in their correspondence, hous...