The Sundowner’s Dance
Jerry Campbell just wants to be left alone. Grief-stricken over the death of his wife Abigail, the elderly widower and recent retiree is desperate for a change of scenery. When his realtor suggests a new home in Fairview Acres, a retirement community in the Poconos, Jerry figures it will be a nice place to spend the rest of his days in solitude.
Until he moves in.
Weird neighbors. Nightly block parties. Strange noises across his rooftop at all hours. Worst of all is Arthur Peterson, chairman of the Fairview Acres Community Association, who seems obsessed with coaxing Jerry into participating in neighborhood activities.
At first, Jerry shrugs off the incidents and eccentricities, telling himself he doesn’t want to be the guy who complains about everything—but that all changes one evening when Katherine Dunnally appears on his doorstep with an ominous warning: “You need to leave. The worms…they dance at nightfall…”
His neighbors all say Katherine suffers from a form of dementia called Sundowner’s Syndrome, but as the weeks progress and the strangeness mounts, Jerry begins to suspect there is something else going on in his neighborhood. Something that has to do with the huge stone in the community park…
Heartfelt and unsettling, Todd Keisling’s latest novel, The Sundowner’s Dance, propels readers through a terrifying exploration of grief, dementia, and perhaps the greatest horror of all: growing old.
TODD KEISLING
TODD KEISLING is the two-time Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of Devil’s Creek, Scanlines, Cold, Black & Infinite, and most recently, The Sundowner’s Dance, among several others. A pair of his earlier works were recipients of the University of Kentucky’s Oswald Research & Creativity Prize for Creative Writing (2002 and 2005), and his second novel, The Liminal Man, was an Indie Book Award finalist in Horror & Suspense (2013). He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
He works as a freelance graphic designer under the moniker of Dullington Design Co. In 2021, he was the recipient of This Is Horror’s Award for Cover Art of the Year for his cover design of Arterial Bloom, edited by Mercedes M. Yardley and published by Crystal Lake Publishing.
Todd is an active member of the Horror Writers Association.
He is a former editor for The Self-Publishing Review, hosted Crystal Lake Publishing’s Beneath the Lake interview series, and co-hosted the popular live YouTube series Awkward Conversations with Geeky Writers alongside Mercedes M. Yardley, Anthony J. Rapino, Nikki Nelson-Hicks, Eryk Pruitt, and Amelia Bennett.
A former Kentucky resident, Keisling now lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
in convo with
Jonathan Lees
After twenty-five years working with video and film in NYC, Jonathan Lees has now materialized in the Hudson Valley to continue inscribing arcane texts for accursed volumes such as the Bad Hand Books releases, Long Division, and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning anthology, The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors, the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award nominated, Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology, and his story, "Power Out, Wind Howling" from Even In The Grave, recently received an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Fifteen.