This New Southern Gothic Novel Is an Addicting Feminist Thriller

Paulette Kennedy’s new novel, The Devil and Mrs. Davenport, combines a paranormal thriller, and murder mystery, and a gothic feminist ghost story all into one. Whether you’re looking for a summer beach read or a light horror novel, this book will scratch that itch.

The Devil and Mrs. Davenport tells the story of Loretta Davenport, a young Christian housewife who has spent her whole adult life married to her charismatic husband Pete. However, after an illness, Loretta begins to hear voices. Soon, those voices explode into intense visions and haunting apparitions. Loretta, it turns out, has developed psychic abilities.

She immediately sees these abilities as a gift from God, and a long-awaited validation of the faith she’s been chasing ever since her marriage to Pete. However, Pete sees her abilities as diabolical, and soon launches a terrifying quest to get her back under his control. But Loretta is determined to use her gift to solve the case of a young girl’s recent murder, even if it means revealing secrets that certain powerful men in her community would rather keep buried.

Be warned: once you start this novel, you won’t be able to tear yourself away from it. The Devil and Mrs. Davenport is fast-paced and full of twists and turns, as Loretta bounces from Pete’s strict Christian community to the world of psychoanalysis to eerie encounters with the dead. I was forced to put the novel down at one point to tend to my real life, and I worried about Loretta’s fate the whole time the book wasn’t in my hands. The novel deftly taps into issues like domestic abuse and gothic tropes like symbolic rot and decay. It’s a wild, riveting yarn.

It’s not perfect, of course. The prose is pretty clunky at times, and the identity of the murderer is obvious pretty early on. Plus, despite the audacious scrapes Loretta finds herself in, her plans for escape always seem to fall together a little too easily, with things miraculously working out right when the plot needs them to.

But honestly? It’s such a fun read that I didn’t mind its problems. In Loretta, readers will find a solid, old-fashioned heroine they can root for.

The Devil and Mrs. Davenport is available from Lake Union Publishing.

(featured image: Lake Union Publishing)