I’m Kathy L. Brown and delighted to join The Literary Underworld team! I write speculative fiction with a historical twist. My hometown— St. Louis, Missouri —and its history inspire my fiction.
A Sherlock Holmes story collection captivated me as a ten-year-old. If every tale must have a maker, I resolved to be a maker, too. I immediately wrote a knock-off Sherlockian story, which was greeted with wide critical acclaim (by my teacher). I was hooked, really. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had ruined me for honest work.
However, I came of age in a tumultuous time. Despite the nascent women’s liberation movement’s encouragement, I convinced myself I had nothing to say to a world in upheaval. Thus, as a new college graduate, I landed a job as a book editor, an ideal pairing of my desire to read all day and a personality that picks at small details. Those skills served me well in a subsequent (and better paying) medical research career.
However, the need to make stories never truly left me. The haunted 1920s world of my book series, The Sean Joye Investigations, was conceived in a beginners’ creative writing workshop.
My supernatural noir stories’ gestation and birth took years. Meanwhile, I earned a creative writing certificate and wrote various fantasy stories for magazines and anthologies. Under my own imprint, I published two short Sean Joye adventures while working on a novel, The Big Cinch. Montag Press Collective published The Big Cinch in December 2021, and it is now available through The Literary Underworld website.
Currently, I’m polishing the next Sean Joye novel, The Talking Cure. We live in an exciting time for stories, and I want to be part of it all. My goals include produce stories in more formats, such as serials, audiobooks, and games. Check out the Sean Joye short stories and novellas at my website, kathylbrown.com.
The Big Cinch
The Big Cinch embeds readers in a magic-laced St. Louis, once known as Mound City, home of the indigenous Americans’ Mississippian ancestors. Little evidence of their civilization survives in 1924, apart from the popular Piasa monster image, invoked to sell plows as well as ornament civic pageants.
Sean Joye, a recent Irish immigrant, tried to avoid fae attention and ignore his magical abilities since childhood. A young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, he aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean life in America. Sean helps a wealthy, powerful, magic-dabbling family—founders of the most exclusive club in town, the Piasa Lodge—with a discreet inquiry or two. Sexually involved with a secretive, high-society flapper, he falls hard for her fiancé, a Great War flying ace with a few secrets of his own.
But Sean asks the wrong questions about a kidnapped toddler and missing Native American artifacts and becomes a suspect in his lover’s bludgeoning and a tycoon’s murder. Can he master the paranormal abilities he’s rejected for so long in time to protect the innocent and save his own skin?
The Big Cinch will appeal to a wide range of readers:
- Fans of a wise-cracking mage, such as in Ben Aaronovitch’sThe Hanging Tree, Steven Blackmoore’s Dead Things, and Jim Butcher’s Skin Games
- Lovers of secret societies who worship mysterious, supernatural forces, such as in Matt Ruff’sLovecraft Country, Victor LaValle’s Ballad of Black Tom, Cherie Priest’s Chapelwood, and China Mieville’s The Last Days of Paris
- Supporters of fiction that reflects cultural and sexual diversity, such as in Anne Bishop’sLake Silence: The World of the Others and V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Light
Kathy L. Brown lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Her hometown and its history inspire her fiction. When she’s not thinking about how haunted everything is, she enjoys writing elaborate notes about her tabletop roleplaying games. Her supernatural noir novel, The Big Cinch novel won the 2022 Imadjinn award for best urban fantasy novel. Other stories in the Sean Joye Investigations world include The Resurrectionist and Water of Life. Kathy’s blog lives kathylbrown.com.