Submitted by Terry Dean
Cassandra King spends her days writing in her home office near Beaufort, SC, listening to blue grass music, and looking out her windows onto a marsh much like the ones that surround Amelia Island. When her writing is done, or she needs a break, she devotes her time to her other loves – cooking, gardening, and watching the sunset show on the marsh with her husband, author Pat Conroy whom she met when he wrote a blurb for her first novel, Making Waves in Zion (1995).
King is the author of five novels, most recently the critically acclaimed, Moonrise (2013), a Fall 2013 Okra Pick and Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) bestseller, which has been described as King’s “finest book to date.”
Like all of King’s novels, Moonrise is about friendship, especially among women, and is set in the South, not by the marshes, but in the small town of Highlands in the North Carolina mountains, where King and Conroy like to vacation. Moonrise is a gothic novel, a mix of horror and romance with a decidedly Southern accent. It was inspired by a visit King made to Highlands on a working vacation, where she and Conroy stayed in an historic house with a neglected garden. While there, they discovered the grave of the one-time owner amid the weeds. As luck would have it, King was reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and the combination of these elements – the house, the mountains, the mystery of the grave, and Rebecca –fired King’s imagination and Moonrise began to take shape.
The finished product pays homage to the house, to Highlands and the mountains of NC, to friendship, including its darker side, and to Du Maurier’s classic. In a pre-publication review, Publishers Weekly praised King for “keeping the best of (Du Maurier’s) atmospheric tension without falling into melodramatic cliché……A suspenseful gothic that gives a nod to its predecessors while still being fresh.”
In the novel, Helen falls in love with and marries Emmet, a television journalist, who has recently lost his wife in a tragic and somewhat mysterious accident. When they decide to spend the summer in his late wife’s family home in Highlands where a close knit circle of old friends also summer, tension runs high. Helen tries her best to fit in, but feels unwelcome and uncertain whom among them she can trust. The house itself, despite her enchantment with its grandeur, is sometimes lonely and foreboding. As the summer progresses and pressures build, Helen and the others make their way to a resolution that reflects the ways that we all can be haunted by the past and must choose who and what to trust to move forward into our futures.
Her previous works include Queen of Broken Hearts (2008), praised as “wonderful”, “uplifting”, “absolutely fabulous”, and “filled with irresistible characters,” by such notable Southern authors as Sandra Brown, Fannie Flagg and Dorothea Benton Frank. The Same Sweet Girls (2005) and The Sunday Wife (2002) were equally highly praised and each won numerous awards. Her first novel, Making Waves in Zion was published in 1995. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. In addition to writing, she has also taught on the college level, conducted corporate writing seminars, worked as a newspaper reporter, and published an article on her second favorite pastime, cooking, in Cooking Light magazine.
Moonrise, like King’s other novels, is populated with richly drawn characters that quickly become people you feel you know. The settings are so vividly brought to life that they become characters themselves as well as places you want to go. Pat Conroy, admittedly biased though he is, perhaps said it best in an interview for the Times Picayune in September of 2013, When Sandra hands me a completed chapter or leaves it on my pillow to read, an immense joy fills me because Sandra always hands me a complete world to cast myself adrift in.
Meet Cassandra King, and perhaps get cast adrift in one of her worlds, at the 2014 Amelia Island Book Festival, February 21 – 22, 2014. She will be the keynote at the Moonrise over Amelia, VyStar Readers Luncheon on Saturday, February 22. Go to www.ameliaislandbookfestival.com for more information or to purchase tickets.
January 21, 2014 12:45 p.m.