Earthy, primal horror full of backwoods magic and poetry, Where Dark Things Grow is a terrific first showing by a lyrical new voice. Andrew K. Clark is one to watch!

This is Southern Gothic that blows the rockers right off that big Appalachian front porch. Andrew K. Clark has written a fierce narrative rife with an evil foreboding in the 1930s, North Carolina, Blue Ridge mountains. Prose that shimmers with the atmosphere of the darkest midnight hue. All Hail Where Dark Things Grow— a novel that burns with frozen blue horrors.

Where Dark Things Grow is alive, haunted, magical. All of that is so grounded in place, not just through the details that accrue, but in the particularity of the language that shapes the country and the characters. Leo and his harmed people, the surprises, the mysteries his actions uncover, are born up by Clark’s masterful control of the word. Something absolutely alchemical happens in the telling.

Where Dark Things Grow is a chilling, poetic debut. With gorgeous language and gothic ghosts, Andrew K. Clark will break your heart on one page and make your skin crawl on the next.

As haunting as all fireside stories should be. Where Dark Things Grow will make you sleep with the lights on.

Stephen King meets Appalachia meets Flannery O'Connor's the Misfit.

In Where Dark Things Grow, Andrew Clark leads us, with a keen eye and an evocative voice, into the Appalachian Mountains during the Depression, and there we find the poverty we expect to see as it’s experienced by the novel’s central character, Leo, a teenage boy who soon discovers what we don’t expect, a world filled with dark magic and powerful shadow creatures Leo thinks he can control in an effort to alleviate the hardships he and his family suffer. His naivety sets the stage for a battle between good and evil that’s ultimately more ancient even than the mountains surrounding him. Clark’s voice is as authentic as his imagination is vivid, and the mountains he writes about are uniquely his own.

With roots as deep and tangled as the blue man's trees, Where Dark Things Grow is a mesmerizing tale of magic and monsters, of family and fate, but also a reflection on the problem of power and the weight of abuses the most vulnerable carry, and how maybe we should be looking to the children to save us. A bold debut from a natural storyteller.

With a poet’s tongue and fireside storyteller’s spare style, Andrew Clark infuses his novel Where Dark Things Grow with a good, strong dose of timeless Carolina twilight. Like a combination of Ray Bradbury and William Faulkner, he tells an adventure tale of young people facing terrifying forces both real and unreal, of mountain magic and violence and man’s evil, and a sense of menace older than the woods. Where Dark Things Grow is a book to read aloud, to savor, to ponder. It’s not about haunted things, it is itself haunted.

Andrew K. Clark’s Where Dark Things Grow shimmers in the atmospheric penumbra cast in this beautifully rendered and imaginative debut set against the tattered backdrop of 1930’s rural Appalachia. Leo, the young protagonist battles family dysfunction, a landscape fraught with tormentors, folkloric beasts, and the dazzle of light and shadow.

Where Dark Things Grow is a sweeping tale set in a fully realized world of faith, belief, myth, folklore and violence in the not so distant mountains of North Carolina, a world of rippling shadows and late-night journeys wrapped in darkness and the young and old who must survive and save each other at any cost. Andrew K. Clark boldly puts a name to the evil.

Let me be plain – Where Dark Things Grow is full of magic, in the deepest, oldest sense of the word. At times endearing, at times brutal, but at all times haunting, Andrew K. Clark's debut novel is a spiraling tale in the greatest tradition of the Southern Gothic. Creeping out of the mythic and the monsters, the Old Testament revenge lines and the old world occult, is a tale of men and women, boys and girls, each at their most fallible, each being tempted and tested. This is not the sort of praise I throw around lightly, but it must be said- with Where Dark Things Grow Clark has made his mark in Appalachian literature.

Where Dark Things Grow is so richly colored it pulls you into the depths of Appalachia, and every shadow and sun ray will swing you through the spectrum of emotions right along with the characters that feel like our friends and family. Man, this book is so fuckin’ good it made me plan a trip home to West Virginia so I could sit in a forest clearing and hope for some magic.

If you're a fan of magical realism and Appalachian Gothic, Andrew K. Clark's Where Dark Things Grow is a must-read -- a high and haunting tale of highland lore that burns with forces both dark and light, rendered with a poet's eye for detail and wild sparks of wonder.

Andrew K. Clark's Where Dark Things Grow, is a page-turning epic of gothic adventure, full of wildly imagined creatures and black magic, propulsive, deeply felt, and wonderful. A marvel of a book.