Nosetouch Press published SUMMERVILLE by D.T. Neal in 2013 and is excited to be working with him to publish RETURN TO SUMMERVILLE in 2024. We asked Neal to talk further about it:
Nosetouch Press: You’d walked away from horror with your SHUTTERCLIQUE series of superhero stories, beginning with BRIGHTEYES. What brought you back to SUMMERVILLE, over a decade later?
D.T. Neal: It’s weird to go back to it, because the literary landscape has changed so much since SUMMERVILLE first came out. It was part of an unofficial trilogy of eco-horror novellas (RELICT and THE DAY OF THE NIGHTFISH being the other two), and for a long time, I was content to let those three novellas stand together that way.
However, I kept seeing feedback from readers who talked about how much they loved the story and how they wished it was longer. So, part of this return is me wanting to give readers another Summerville story, a novel this time, not a novella. In this way, I could go back to that ghost town and shake things up, let readers delve back into that world.
NP: Audience feedback has been strong with SUMMERVILLE—readers seem to love the story, while hating the characters.
DTN (laughing): Yeah, that’s sort of funny. Southern writers formed a big part of my literary backstory—Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, William Faulkner, and others. Southern Gothic resonates with me, and SUMMERVILLE was my own attempt to honor that literary tradition. One thing I love about that fiction is the host of off-putting, disagreeable characters form the heart of it. The South is full of oddballs, and so I willfully made the characters in SUMMERVILLE that way; they’re meant to be irritating because it works for the genre and makes the perfectly suited to meeting their end in the ghost town.
As an eco horror story, you’re not really supposed to be rooting (pun intended) for humanity. Rather, the monstrous plant (who I casually refer to as “Madame Summerville”) symbolizes angry (or, at best, predatory) nature extracting revenge on unsuspecting souls. Some readers have mentioned the 1980s slasher movie vibe of the story, and they’re not wrong. I served up those characters on a platter.
NP: You sure did. Can you tell us where RETURN TO SUMMERVILLE came from? To reiterate what we said earlier: why go back?
DTN: I love ghost towns and ghost ships. They’re inherently intriguing to me. And, strictly speaking, Summerville has both—there’s the town itself, and the ghost of the blockade runner with the fabled cache of brandy that drove the original characters to seek it out, bless their hearts.
There’s unfinished business in Summerville, and as global warming continues to worsen, the importance of eco horror only grows (ouch, another pun). One can look at the South and see it getting pummeled by global warming-fueled weather disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, dust storms, wildfires—and see Nature’s wrath increasing. There may be a time when we see far more ghost towns in the South (and Southwest) as it becomes too difficult to live there and people just flee for places where it seems easier to exist without everything being destroyed. Hell, even those brain-eating amoebas in ponds, lakes, and rivers down there are enough to instill terror (referring to Naegleria fowleri).
Humanity owes it to ourselves to respect nature, full knowing that Nature’s got a bone or two to pick with us even on a good day. Madame Summerville was certainly inspired by kudzu, the often-referenced “Vine That Ate the South”—invasive species and the like, they overturn the scales and disrupt the balance inherent in healthy Nature.
We don’t have to worry about killer plants like Madame Summerville, so the story allows for a pleasing escapism that is still on-point about the ecological disaster we’re barreling toward.
NP: (spoiler warning) At the end of SUMMERVILLE, Talulah effectively gives birth to a new Madame Summerville on the Duke campus. Do you pick up where that left off, since it was a dramatic and horrifying conclusion to that story.
DTN: Anybody reading this will already know that answer! I wasn’t concerned with picking that up exactly; I rather liked leaving that out there for people to remember, so that what resolves in RETURN TO SUMMERVILLE leaves that open-ended. I can imagine a Plant Biology major at Duke finding that plant on campus and trouble coming from that, but it’s really its own story.
NP: SUMMERVILLE III: TALULAH’S REVENGE?
DTN (laughs): Oh, I never say never, but, honestly, my focus with this sequel is squarely on Summerville, not on any offshoots. What readers wanted was a deeper dive into Summerville, and I delivered that with this sequel.
NP: You brought back Ladygirl…
DTN: I did. But that was just fun. I loved that car, and when Talulah steals it to escape Summerville and drives it to Duke to die/give birth, I imagined campus police ultimately ticketing that abandoned car, and it finding its way to an impound lot, to be eventually auctioned off, since nobody would know how it got there.
It felt like a perfect sort of hook to draw readers back into the story, with Ladygirl being a kind of authorial ambassador that might tip its cap to the original novella while both literally and figuratively transporting the reader and characters back to Summerville.
The protagonists of RETURN TO SUMMERVILLE, Holly Rivers and Tyler Finn, have a mystery that they want to solve—what happened to Talulah and the others? Where’d everybody go? The documentary they’re seeking to make is emblematic of the found footage-infused social media landscape in ways that weren’t as apparent a decade ago. Holly in particular wants to make her name by “solving” the mystery of these people who disappeared.
Part of the story is Holly unpacking the history and the mystery of Summerville and dragging along her support team with her on this adventure.
NP: Shades of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT in this?
DTN: Shades, yes. I didn’t originally think of that, except that the social media documentarian aspect of it was as perfect a vehicle for the story as Ladygirl. Holly’s going to solve this case that nobody’s asking to be solved, and in so doing, she unearths a literally growing nightmare.
NP: And nice to see Cooper DeVille is still kicking.
DTN: People love Cooper, my own harbinger. He’s that quiet old sort of southern trouble, is in cahoots with Madame Summerville and her wasp courtiers. He’s as much of a tie-in to the world as Ladygirl.
NP: Interesting that you opted for a novel with this one.
DTN: Entirely in response to readers wanting more. I’m giving them more. I had that with RELICT, too, another of my novellas. I’m most comfortable writing novels, because they give stories and characters room to stretch. In atmospheric work like SUMMERVILLE, it can help set the tone.
NP: Are you saying you’d consider revisiting RELICT and NIGHTFISH in longer works?
DTN: No, no. Honestly, both of those work as novellas, and the stories they tell are best contained in that format. SUMMERVILLE left some things untended in the fields and streams, and beckoned a return. With that story, there’s the titular ghost town, and the mystery of Madame Summerville—those things politely insisted in a literary return (as well as readers and fans of SUMMERVILLE), so I went back there for them. Readers commented about the 80s horror vibe of SUMMERVILLE, and I think with the sequel, I channeled something deeper—a very 70s paranoid eco horror vibe with RETURN.
NP: What’s next for you?
DTN: My authorly dance card is too FULL! I’ve got four more SHUTTERCLIQUE novels to write (including two spinoffs as well, which’ll be around seven more novels), as well as a couple more SAGAS OF IRTH novels to wrap up that series, and there’s the SIGHTSEER cyberpunk series, too. I’m going to be very busy for the next six or seven years.
NP: We can’t wait!

ECO-HORROR | NOVEL
Y’all come back now.
The ghost town of Summerville comes back to life in RETURN TO SUMMERVILLE, following a pair of biotechnology employees with a mission and a team of documentary podcasters as they seek to unearth the mysterious disappearances surrounding the lost southern town. The spirit of Madame Summerville— the growing monstrosity that plagues the town—seeks to spread far and wide, with or without the knowing help of the people trapped in her clutches. Doubling down on the atmospheric Southern Gothic dread of the original book, RETURN TO SUMMERVILLE offers a fertile landscape for fans of eco horror.
“Comprised of narratives, blog entries, and a testament by the editor, Return to Summerville has the intriguing pull of legend and an undercurrent of dread and fear. As an addendum/sequel to Neal’s novel Summerville, it’s brilliantly and convincingly done. The reader feels like a voyeur in the glow of a screen, reading deep into the night, building questions, having that ‘must know’ feeling grow.
Excellent read.”—Coy Hall, Goodreads review
ABOUT D.T. NEAL
Born in Missouri, growing up in Ohio, and settling in Chicago, D. T. Neal has always written fiction, but only got really serious about it in the late 90s. He brings a strong Rust Belt perspective to his writing, a kind of “Northern Gothic” aesthetic reflective of his background.
Writing his first novel at 29, he then devoted time to his craft and worked on short stories, occupying a space between genre and literary fiction, with an emphasis on horror, science fiction, and fantasy. He has seen some of his short stories published in “Albedo 1,” Ireland’s premier magazine of speculative fiction, and he won second place in their Aeon Award in 2008 for his short story, “Aegis.” He has lived in Chicago since 1993, and is a passionate fan of music, a student of pop culture, an avid photographer and bicycler, and enjoys cooking.
He has published six novels, Saamaanthaa, The Happening, and Norm—collectively known as The Wolfshadow Trilogy—Chosen, Suckage, the cosmic folk horror-comedy thriller, The Cursed Earth, and Return to Summerville. He has also published three novellas—Relict, Summerville, and The Day of the Nightfish.
He co-edited THE FIENDS IN THE FURROWS folk horror anthologies, The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror, The Fiends in the Furrows II: More Tales of Folk Horror, and The Fiends in the Furrows III: Final Harvest.
AWARDS:
• 2008 Aeon Award, Second Place for “Aegis”
• 2009 Honorable Mention, “Best Horror of the Year,” edited by Ellen Datlow for “Aegis” and “Rotgut.”
• Runner-up, 2013 Best New Novel by a Chicagoan, Chicago Reader, for “Suckage”
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Aeon Award for “Day of the
PRODUCT DETAILS
- Paperback: 274 pages
- Language: English
- ISBN-13: 978-1-944286-84-2