Witches on the Road Tonight

"This richly layered novel" from the acclaimed author of The Dress Lodger explores Americana, witchcraft, love, and betrayal ( People , starred review). As a child growing up in Depression-era rural Virginia, Eddie Alley's quiet life is rooted in the rumors of his mother's witchcraft. But when an outsider violently disrupts the spell of his mother's unorthodox life, Eddie is inspired to pursue a future beyond the confines of his dead-end town. He leaves for New York and becomes a television horror-movie presenter beloved for his kitschy comedy. When he opens his family's door to a homeless teenager working as an intern at the TV station, the boy's presence not only awakens something in Eddie, but also in his twelve-year-old daughter, Wallis, who has begun to feel a strange kinship to her notorious grandmother. As the ghost stories of one generation infiltrate the next, Wallis and Eddie grapple with the sins of the past in this gripping novel that "explores the dark vein of magic that runs just beneath our real lives" ( The New York Times Book Review ). "Holman is a master of the miniature. She uses tiny, achingly accurate details to bring each moment to life on the page; her sentences sing . . . [her] most ambitious and successful yet." #8212; People , starred review "Holman has an imagination that is both capacious and meticulous, and by turns somber and antic . . . Witches on the Road Tonight is a path into her work that beckons, with strange lights and mysterious apparitions." #8212;Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Review of Books "Mysterious, beautiful, and immediately engrossing . . . A tour de force of meticulous research brought urgently to life by headlong, transporting prose." #8212;Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach and A Visit From the Goon Squad On the eve of World War II, eight-year-old Eddie Alley lies in bed watching his first horror movie, hand-cranked and flickering on the bare wall of a backwoods cabin. In 2011, Eddie's daughter, Wallis, an anchorwoman for a twenty-four hour news channel, lies in bed with a stranger, spinning ghost stories. Between these two nights winds the story of the Alley family – Eddie's mother, Cora, an Appalachian mountain witch who slips out of her skin after nightfall; Captain Casket, Eddie's alter ego, a campy 1970's TV horror-movie host; and Jasper, the orphaned boy Eddie brings home, who is determined to destroy Eddie's illusions even if it means destroying himself. His private life shattered amid rumors of his mother's witchcraft activities, Eddie Alley leaves his Depression-era Virginia hometown to begin a television career in New York and finds the past returning years later when he offers shelter to a homeless teen