Jen Julian’s Red Rabbit Ghost is swamp-soaked Southern Gothic that keeps slipping into weird procedural, like True Detective got drunk on magnolia wine and decided to learn a dead language. It’s moody, knotty, and alive with small-town rot. It also occasionally wanders, like a tipsy pilgrim in a kudzu maze. I still had a damn good time.

Julian is not a rookie. She won the Press 53 Award for her collection Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, holds a PhD in English and an MFA from UNC Greensboro, is a Clarion alum, and teaches creative writing in the Georgia mountains. In short: serious chops, not your cousin’s self-pubbed creepypasta.

We start with Jesse, a college kid who comes slinking back to Blacknot, North Carolina, where the air smells like pork fat and ghosts. Jesse’s mom died years ago on the Miskwa River; he keeps her life in a red Tarbarrel jerky tin, a greasy reliquary stuffed with clippings and trinkets that signal a mystery he can’t stop picking at. When a cryptic contact named Cat starts feeding him artifacts and instructions, Jesse goes rabbit-holing into a secret grammar made of objects, altars, and river-muck syntax. Meanwhile, a girl from town, Morgan Taylor, vanishes, and the county mobilizes with Facebook fervor and sanctimony.

In a counter-narrative, we follow Alice Swink, the sheltered harpist daughter of a local big deal and her church-perfect stepmom. Alice is medicated, observant, and quietly furious. She’s also trafficking in witchfingers — tick-sized black kernels associated with an old spiritualist cult — for a ritual she probably should not be doing. The exchange, brokered by her father’s immaculate assistant, crackles with danger and class tension.

Everything tilts toward the Night House, a once-brothel with a mean history and thin walls between worlds. The book’s title phrase is itself part of the secret lexicon: “red Rabbit ghost” translates as “the buried place” or “submerged realm,” which is both literal and a mission statement.

This is a novel about language as ritual and ritual as confession. Julian literalizes the idea that grief teaches you a private tongue: Jesse learns to “read” altars the way you parse a sentence, each feather and nail a verb or preposition pointing toward the mother he lost and the rot he inherited. The town itself is semiotic — church hymns, Facebook prayer chains, courthouse handshakes — a noisy public grammar that tries to overwrite Jesse’s and Alice’s private dialects.

The swamp isn’t just atmosphere. It’s a temperament. Class resentment bubbles up like rot gas; genteel South Greene sniffs disdain at Pinewood’s addicts while quietly buying their hush. The Angel Battalion lore and those stupidly named witchfingers puncture the myth that horror lives only in “old times.” The past is busy texting the present. Julian’s sentences are sensual but unshowy, humid without going purple, and she salts the dread with deadpan humor. A Le Guin epigraph about reaching out in the dark is not cute window dressing; it’s the novel’s moral math problem.

At heart, Red Rabbit Ghost is a referendum on agency. Jesse wants the past to tell him who he is; he also wants to be the one doing the telling. Alice is tired of performing good-girl wellness while adults weaponize “what’s best for you.” Both discover that meaning is collaborative and coercive at once. You make an altar and the altar makes you back. The book’s weird grammar conceit becomes a sneaky argument about how communities author, erase, and resurrect their sinners — mothers, daughters, queer kids, the poor — depending on who’s doing the reading.

Strengths

• Setting that crawls. Blacknot and the Miskwa have bandwidth. Farmers’ market kitsch, church politics, and hog-farm stench cohabit in a way that feels lived-in instead of postcard-Southern. The missing-girl search coils tight with petty civic pride and performative piety.
• The lexicon gimmick works. The “object language” could have been a twee puzzle box. Instead, Julian makes it tactile and unnerving. When Cat explains “red Rabbit ghost,” it lands like a spell you feel in your molars.
• Alice rules. Her scenes are sharp with class sting and maternal theater. The car exchange for witchfingers with Mrs. Patton is a small masterclass in implication.
• Authorial control. The “Meet the Author” pedigree isn’t just resume candy; the prose has the confidence of someone who has been sharpening knives for years.

Critiques

• The pace gets swamp-thick. The early middle sags as the book loads lore and triangulates POVs. You occasionally feel like you’re wading in hip-deep water shouting “plot, you little bastard, where are you.” Things click harder once Night House momentum kicks in.
• Cat’s mystique sometimes outpaces plausibility. The texty omniscience is creepy-good, but a few beats lean on “because weird” rather than earned reveal. When the book does translate its mysteries, it’s satisfying; a couple threads could use one more tug.
• Social satire can go broad. Some South Greene types read as well-aimed caricature. Funny, yes, but it blunts a little of the moral ambiguity the novel otherwise thrives on.

Red Rabbit Ghost feels genuinely original, not because it invents new monsters, but because it treats language itself like a haunted object, turning grief and class politics into a cracked grammar you can cut your fingers on. The pacing starts hot, sinks into a swampy, lore-heavy middle, then tightens into a lean, nervy back half that pays off the weird. Characters are the book’s backbone: Jesse is a tender, messy investigator who needs therapy and boundaries; Alice is a blade wrapped in bubble wrap, quietly furious and impossible to look away from; the adults orbit them in vivid shades of hypocrisy, grief, and control. The scare profile skews dread over jump-scare, more “the land is wrong and watching you” than “boo.” It’s the kind of unease that lingers in your teeth after midnight, with the Night House sequences delivering the coldest shivers.

Strong. Well-crafted, distinctive, and sticky. It didn’t blow the top of my head off, but it got under my nails and stayed there. The kind of book I’d recommend often, especially to readers who like their hauntings tangled up with language, class, and family systems.

TL;DR: A humid, clever Southern Gothic where grief is a language you learn with feathers and nails. Two young narrators chase a vanished girl and an older crime into the swamp’s private grammar, guided by a sus text-oracle. Slow in places, but memorable, unsettling, and beautifully made.