Andrew K. Clark

Andrew K. Clark is a writer from Asheville, NC where his people settled before the Revolutionary War. His poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer was published by Main Street Rag Press and was shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Award. His debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press September 10, 2024. His work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review, and The Wrath Bearing Tree. He received his MFA from Converse College. Connect with him at andrewkclark.com.

Where Dark Things Grow jacket copy:
Fifteen-year-old Leo is watching the world crumble. His father is missing, and his mother is slipping into madness as she cares for Leo, his sick sister Goldfish, and two useless brothers. Relatives are no help, and the church folk have turned their backs. Oh, and he’s being stalked by the ghost of his dead baby brother, Jacob.
When Leo discovers an enchanted wulver that will do his bidding, he decides to settle old scores. Revenge is sweet, but Leo soon learns he cannot control what he’s unleashed. It takes his spitfire best friend Lilyfax to help Leo overcome his anger as they set out to rescue trafficked girls rumored to be frozen in the trees by the mysterious Blue Man.
Where Dark Things Grow is set in 1930s Southern Appalachia & Asheville and reads like Daniel Woodrell meets Stephen Graham Jones. It features elements of folklore, Southern Gothic, magical realism, and horror.
Categories: Southern Literature / U.S. Southern Gothic / North Carolina Literature / Dark Literature / Southern Gothic / Magical Realism / Horror

Blurbs:
(I don’t have all my blurbs back; expecting additional blurbs from Jason Mott, Ivy Pochoda, Tess Fontaine, Steven Dunn, Meagan Lucas and perhaps others).
In Where Dark Things Grow, Andrew Clark leads us, with a keen eye and an evocative voice, into the Appalachian Mountains during the Depression, and there we find the poverty we expect to see as it’s experienced by the novel’s central character, Leo, a teenage boy who soon discovers what we don’t expect, a world filled with dark magic and powerful shadow creatures Leo thinks he can control in an effort to alleviate the hardships he and his family suffer. His naivety sets the stage for a battle between good and evil that’s ultimately more ancient even than the mountains surrounding him. Clark’s voice is as authentic as his imagination is vivid, and the mountains he writes about are uniquely his own.
– Marlin Barton, author of Children of Dust
Let me be plain- Where Dark Things Grow is full of magic, in the deepest, oldest sense of the word. At times endearing, at times brutal, but at all times haunting, Andrew K. Clark's debut novel is a spiraling tale in the greatest tradition of the Southern Gothic. Creeping out of the mythic and the monsters, the Old Testament revenge lines and the old-world occult, is a tale of men and women, boys and girls, each at their most fallible, each being tempted and tested. This is not the sort of praise I throw around lightly, but it must be said- with Where Dark Things Grow Clark has made his mark in Appalachian literature.
– Steph Post, author of Miraculum
With a poet’s tongue and fireside storyteller’s spare style, Andrew Clark infuses his novel Where Dark Things Grow with a good, strong dose of timeless Carolina twilight. Like a combination of Ray Bradbury and William Faulkner, he tells an adventure tale of young people facing terrifying forces both real and unreal, of mountain magic and violence and man’s evil, and a sense of menace older than the woods. Where Dark Things Grow is a book to read aloud, to savor, to ponder. It’s not about haunted things, it is itself haunted.
– Polly Schattel, author of The Occultists and Shadowdays.

This is Southern Gothic that blows the rockers right off that big Appalachian front porch. Andrew K. Clark has written a fierce narrative rife with an evil foreboding in the 1930s, North Carolina, Blue Ridge mountains. Prose that shimmers with the atmosphere of the darkest midnight hue. Where Dark Things Grow — a novel that burns with frozen blue horrors.
– Daren Dean, author of Roads, This Vale of Tears, The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American South
Stephen King meets Appalachia meets Flannery O'Connor's the Misfit.
– Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit this to No One

Andrew K. Clark’s Where Dark Things Grow shimmers in the atmospheric penumbra cast in this beautifully rendered and imaginative debut set against the tattered backdrop of 1930’s rural Appalachia. Leo, the young protagonist battles family dysfunction, a landscape fraught with tormentors, folkloric beasts, and the dazzle of light and shadow.
– Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of The Cicada Tree and Georgia Author of the Year