Elaine Lamkin's Review of A TWISTED LADDER for DREAD CENTRAL Magazine

Southern Gothic writer Flannery O/Connor once remarked, "Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northem reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."

And Southern playwright Tennessee Williams described Southern Gothic as a style that captured "an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modem experience." First-time author Rhodi Hawk is definitely following in the footsteps of these Southern Gothic masters with her first novel, A Twisted Ladder. Acursed family, decaying plantations and an equally decaying way of life - post antebellum New Orleans, voodoo, insanity - all elements that have driven the Southern Gothic genre through the years.

And Hawk does a masterful job, weaving all of these elements into a 21st Century story with flashbacks to a 20th Centurylifestyle one can only imagine nowadays.