Never Tell Your Dream

In Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1957, eleven-year-old Joshua Brown learns that some family warnings survive for a reason.

Never tell your dream before you eat.

At first, the rule sounds like superstition. Joshua's father, Reverend Xavier Brown, certainly thinks so. He believes in God, hard work, and things that can be explained. Dreams do not belong in his repair shop, his pulpit, or his home.

Then Joshua's dream begins coming true.

A wealthy stranger arrives. Money changes hands. Long-buried hatred begins moving again. Men who believe fear belongs to other people discover that something in the darkness has been listening.

Soon the warnings become impossible to dismiss.

A burning cross refuses to behave as expected.

Dogs appear where no dogs should be.

Threats return to those who made them.

Men wake with marks they cannot explain.

And the dead begin speaking.

Joshua discovers that his family's past is tied to another Joshua Brown, a relative lynched decades earlier after warning his killers that Hell was coming with him. But what followed Uncle Joshua out of that terrible night may not be justice, and it may no longer care who deserves punishment.

As violence spreads through Biloxi, Joshua's family is forced to confront an old truth buried beneath generations of fear:

Some things do not need to be invited twice.

The deeper Joshua's dreams become, the harder it is to know which voice is warning him and which one is waiting for him to answer.

Because one thing protects.

Another thing follows.

And it has learned exactly what people want to hear.

From Jerrimiah Stonecastle comes a Southern Gothic supernatural horror novel about faith, racism, family, inherited fear, and the dangerous power of words spoken when the wrong thing is listening.

Some dreams predict the future.

Some dreams open doors.

And some dreams should never be told.