Tordotcom Publishing is thrilled to announce that DaVaun Sanders has acquired award-winning author Eden Royce’s novella titled Psychopomp and Circumstance, a Southern Gothic historical fantasy about the planning of a contentious funeral that’s grounded in the author’s Gullah Geechee roots.
Publication is scheduled for Winter 2025. The deal for World English rights was brokered by Adriann Zurhellen at Folio Literary Management.
Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. Coddled to within an inch of her life by a mother who refuses to let her daughter live a life other than the one she dictates, Phee yearns to demonstrate she’s capable of more than simply marrying well.
So when word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother’s wrath to step up and accept the role of pomp—the highly honored duty of planning the funeral service. Traveling alone to the town of Horizon and her aunt’s unsettling home, Phee soon discovers that visions and shadows beckon from every reflective surface, and that some secrets transcend the borders of life and death.
Predatory morticians, Gullah funeral traditions, folkloric beings, and a twenty-something’s coming of age in a fantastical Charleston where your family is defined by how they care for their dead.
My people’s funerary traditions have always held a fascination for me. I’ve been going to family funerals since I was a young child: the planning, the cooking, the traveling—sometimes for hours—in order to celebrate the life of the deceased. I’ve been thinking about how to present a story with these themes for a while.
To do that through a lens of an alt-history Charleston felt right. I set Psychopomp during the Reconstruction Era, where not enough speculative fiction stories take place. A real and all-to-brief time in United States history during the last half of the 1800s where Black people voted, won elections to Southern state legislatures, and even held seats in Congress.
I wondered what would make a young, free, well-to-do Black woman during this era, raised to be respectable and marriageable, break from the constraints and comforts of that society. After deciding it was the death of a beloved, yet estranged aunt, I wondered: What would that young woman risk to give her aunt the funeral she deserves?
—author Eden Royce
My love for Eden’s storytelling first took flight years ago after reading one of her stories in the second issue of FIYAH. Her work is exquisite, unrelenting, and never fails to pull her readers headfirst into an enthralling, hauntingly beautiful world. When she later shared her intention to develop the bones of Psychopomp and Circumstance, I leapt at the possibility of finding a home for it with Tordotcom. This story is a stunning gateway into Eden’s oeuvre, and I’m envious of the riches her soon-to-be new fans are in line to experience for the first time. Buckle up!
—editor DaVaun Sanders
Eden Royce is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina now living in Southeast England. She is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist for her adult short fiction, which has appeared in various print and online magazines. Her debut middle grade novel, Root Magic, is a Walter Award Honoree, a Nebula Award finalist, a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner, and an Ignyte award winner for outstanding children’s literature.
