Malcolm R. Campbell
Malcolm R. Campbell is an author of magical realism and fantasy. In addition to novels, his work has appeared in The Lascaux Prize 2014 Anthology; Spirits of St. Louis: Missouri Ghost Stories Anthology; Quail Bell Magazine; A View inside Glacier National Park: 100 years, 100 Stories; Future Earth Magazine; The Smoking Poet Magazine; Nonprofit World Magazine; Nostalgia Magazine; and Living Jackson Magazine.
​​
Malcolm's work is sold in all major bookstores, including the following:​
​
Florida Folk Magic Stories
Click cover for excerpt
​
Lena, a shamanistic cat, and her conjure woman Eulalie live in a small town near the Apalachicola River in Florida’s lightly populated Liberty County, where the Klan enforces its own brand of order.
When some white boys rape and murder a black girl named Mattie near the sawmill, the police have no suspects and don’t intend to find any. Eulalie, who sees conjure as a way of helping the good Lord work His will, intends to set things right by “laying tricks.”
​
But Eulalie has secrets of her own, and it’s hard not to look back on her own life and ponder how the decisions she made while drinking and singing at the local juke were, perhaps, the beginning of Mattie’s ending.
Click cover for excerpt
​
Torreya, a small 1950s Florida Panhandle town, is losing its men. They disappear on nights with no moon and no witnesses. Foreclosure signs appear in their yards the following day while thugs associated with the Klan take everything of value. The police won't investigate, and the church keeps its distance from social and political discord.
Conjure woman Eulalie Jenkins and her shamanistic cat Lena discover that the disappearances are linked to Washerwoman, a powerful hoodoo man.
Even though Eulalie is older than dirt, her faith in the good Lord and her supply of spells guarantee she will give Washerwoman a run for his ill-gotten money in this swamps and piney woods story.
Click cover for excerpt
​
When Police Chief Alton Gravely and Officer Carothers escalate the feud between “Torreya’s finest” and conjure woman Eulalie Jenkins by running her off the road into a north Florida swamp, the borrowed pickup truck is salvaged but Eulalie is missing and presumed dead. Her cat Lena survives. Lena could provide an accurate account of the crime, but the county sheriff is unlikely to interview a pet.
​
Lena doesn’t think Eulalie is dead, but the conjure woman’s family and friends don’t believe her. When the feared Black Robes of the Klan attack the first responder who believes the wreck might have been staged, Lena is the only one who can help him try to fight them off. After that, all hope seems lost, because if Eulalie is alive and finds her way back to Torreya, there are plenty of people waiting to kill her and make sure she stays dead.
Click cover for excerpt
​
In 1954, the Florida Panhandle town of Torreya had more Klansmen per acre than fire ants. Sparrow, a bag lady; Pollyanna, an auditor; and Jack, the owner of Slade’s Diner, step on fire ants and Klansmen whenever they can while an unknown archer fires fate-changing arrows at the Klan’s leadership. They are not who they appear to be, and while they take risks, they must be discrete lest they end up in the Klan’s gunsights.
Bolstered by support from a black cat and an older-than-dirt conjure woman, Pollyanna persists in her fight against the Klan, determined to restore law and order to a small town filled with corruption.
Florida Folk Magic Stories, Boxed Set
Stories from Tate's Hell
Short stories set in the Florida Panhandle
The Land Between the Rivers features three tales set before the dawn of recorded time in the Florida Panhandle world bordered by the Apalachicola River, Ochlockonee River and the Gulf of Mexico. This diverse environment of coastline, baygalls, swamps and forests includes the beautiful and notorious Tate’s Hell State Forest.
In "How the Panther Lost Her Roar," you’ll meet the rare and endangered Florida Panther that could be found in Tate’s Hell as late as the 1960s.
In "How the Snake Bird Learned to Dry His Feathers," you’ll meet a Florida bird—also called the Anhinga—that learns to swim before he learns to fly.
And, in "How the Bear Found Her Favorite Food," you’ll learn what the Florida black bear eats when she has her choice. These stories begin where the Seminole Creation Myth ends as seen through the eyes of Eulalie, the root doctor in Campbell's Florida Folk Magic Stories.
When David travels to north Florida to see his girlfriend, Anne, he also meets her Aunt Ruby and learns that a secret lurks behind her Scotch whisky and her stories. The secret is Anne’s secret, too.
​
An old guidebook on the coffee table in the salmon-colored doublewide claims he’s entered “Florida, land of flowers, of radiance, of joyous days and dream-touched nights.” Time will tell. They eat meatloaf and key lime pie as a storm rolls in off the gulf coast and scatters the light in the aging trailer park.
​
Everyone needs an Aunt Ruby, a somewhat bawdy but loving relative who counteracts the sanitized version of life we get from our parents, teachers, and each other.
Every spring, fast food junkie Peter Martin packs his wife, Mary, and son, John, into his SUV and crisscrosses the back country of the Florida Panhandle searching for Diddy-Wah-Diddy, a legendary town offering travelers all the free food they can eat. Mary thinks they’ll never find it. John draws maps to show where they’ve been in years past. Peter has more hunches than fleas on a hound dog about the town’s location. More often than not, they get lost.
​
This year, they find Diddy-Wah-Diddy. It’s better than they expected. They begin to eat more than they should. Then Peter has a horrifying accident and disappears. While the powers that be treat Peter’s fall from grace as business as usual, Mary and John wait for him, and while they wait they keep eating all they can eat.
Sarabande
Sarabande is Book 2 in Malcolm R. Campbell's Mountain Journeys series, which can all be found at the links above.
​
Click cover for excerpt
​
When Sarabande’s sister Dryad haunts her for three years beyond the grave, Sarabande begins a dangerous journey into the past to either raise her cruel sister from the dead, ending the torment, or to take her place in the safe darkness of the earth. In spite of unsettling predictions about her trip, Sarabande leaves the mountains of Pyrrha and Montana on a black horse named Sikimí and heads for the cornfields of Illinois in search of Robert Adams, the once powerful Sun Singer, hoping he can help with her quest.
​
One man tries to kill her alongside a deserted prairie road, another tries to save her with ancient wisdom, and Robert tries to send her away. Even if she persuades him to bring the remnants of his magic to Dryad's shallow grave, the desperate man who follows them desires the rowan staff for ill intent, and the malicious sister who awaits their arrival wants much more than a mere return to life.
Widely Scattered Ghosts
Click cover for excerpt
​
A readers’ advisory for this collection of nine stories forecasts widely scattered ghosts with a chance of rain. Caution is urged at the following uncertain places: an abandoned mental hospital, the woods behind a pleasant subdivision, a small fishing village, a mountain lake, a long-closed theater undergoing restoration, a feared bridge over a swampy river, a historic district street at dusk, the bedroom of a girl who waited until the last minute to write her book report from an allegedly dead author, and the woods near a conjure woman’s house.
​
In effect from the words “light of the harvest moon was brilliant” until the last phrase “forever rest in peace,” this advisory includes—but may not be limited to—the Florida Panhandle, northwest Montana, central Illinois, and eastern Missouri.
Special Investigative Reporter
Click cover for excerpt
​
In this satirical and somewhat insane lament about the fall of traditional journalism into an abyss of news without facts, Special Investigative Reporter Jock Stewart specializes in tracking down Junction City’s inept and corrupt movers and shakers for his newspaper The Star-Gazer. Since Stewart is not a team player, he doesn’t trust anyone, especially colleagues and news sources. Stewart, who became a reporter back in the days when real newsmen were supposed to smoke and drink themselves to death while fighting to get the scoop before their competition sobered up, isn’t about to change.
Stewart’s girlfriend leaves him, the mayor’s racehorse is stolen, people are having sex in all the wrong places (whatever that means), and townspeople have fallen into the habit of sneaking around and lying to reporters and cops. Sure, everyone lies to the cops, but reporters expect gospel truths or else. Stewart may get himself killed doing what he was taught to do in journalism school, but that’s all in a day’s work.