What the Tooth Fairy Left Behind in Belle Morte

Belle Morte Remembers What You Forgot

So Belle Morte means "beautiful death" in Cajun French, which honestly tells you everything you need to know about this town lol. It's one of those tiny coastal Louisiana towns with one road in and one road out, and if you've ever been to one you already know the vibe. The marsh is gorgeous, but it'll also swallow you whole and nobody's going to ask a lot of questions about it.

Last month I introduced y'all to Belle Morte, and this month I want to get into what's actually wrong with it.

Peyton Thibodeaux grew up there and she left, and when she finally comes back she swears up and down it's only for a few days. She is not staying. Spoiler alert, if you're from a small Southern town you already know how that goes.

Down there everybody knows everybody, everybody's got a saint on the dashboard and a grandmother who knows which plants fix what, and there's a whole list of things you just don't talk about. Church and folklore kind of blend together and nobody thinks twice about it.

The scariest part of this book for me isn't anything jumping out of the dark, it's memory. Going home and realizing the version of your childhood you've been carrying around your whole life might not be the real one. That one gets under my skin.

The Tooth Fairy Drowns Here is in progress right now and I'm going to keep sharing pieces of Belle Morte as I write it, so make sure you're following @BayouBoundBooks everywhere so you don't miss anything. And if you're in your spooky era this month, the new Porch Stories Halloween collection is up now at bayouboundbooks.com.

See y'all on the porch.

Welcome to Belle Morte

Belle Morte is french and its direct translation in Cajun French means “beautiful death.” Unfortunately the Cajun French deep in the south of Louisiana is mostly gone now, a language the old timers still carry around in their mouths but nobody ever really wrote down. No dictionary. No textbook. Just something passed mouth to mouth until enough people stopped passing it.

Belle Morte is the name in my fiction town for my southern gothic horror book that I am currently working on. It feels so good to finally get to get some southern horror culture out there for you all.

In Belle Morte there's one road in and one road out. Cracked, narrow, cutting straight through marsh so flat you can see a storm coming from ten miles off. Which is good, because Belle Morte has taken more than its share. You can still find houses nobody ever rebuilt.

Fewer than a thousand people, and every one of them knows every other one's business, whether they want to or not. As I reveal more about the book you will get to see how it unfolds, or you won’t, maybe you will just have to wait until the book gets published. For the ones who are reading this now In my last blog post I dropped the name of the book so if you would like more information on all of this enjoy some of my recent blogs and dive in.

On the edge of town there's a gas plant that runs its lights all night, throwing an orange glow over water that never quite goes dark. It's pretty much the only thing awake in Belle Morte after midnight, besides the dive bar and the mosquitoes. To be honest I’m not sure whats thicker, the blanket of fog over the water some nights or the swarms of mosquitoes.

If you go past the plant it's just straight up marsh marsh, all the way out to the refuge line. It is all just wet, flat, wide open, and no place to hide. And yet, somehow everything still disappears into it anyway.

People from Belle Morte don't speak about what the water has taken.

They just stop mentioning the ones it took.

This is where my next novel lives. The Tooth Fairy Drowns Here.

I'm not telling you what happens there just yet, that would ruin all the fun. I can’t wait to share more, unfortunately it is not the right time.

More soon. 🖤


P.s. please keep in mind The Tooth Fairy Drowns Here is a work in progress and some details may change a little bit from time to time. I only post blogs about the story that are typically set in stone but sometimes stories have a mind of their own!