Welcome to Willet’s Rest.
Small town. Big horrors.
While the tales from Willet's Rest can be enjoyed in any order, they are listed below according to timeline. Across these three stories: an interracial relationship shaped by mental illness, a trans man fighting to exist, two badass trans women, and a hard-of-hearing boy at the heart of adventure.
Content may be disturbing for some readers.
Sherlyn has always known something was wrong with her family. She saw it in her father before he died. She feels it in the thin walls of her mother’s trailer. And after her sister Callie comes home with a smile not her own, Sherlyn sees it again. Something old has been waiting in Willet’s Rest: something tied to Daddy’s hidden books, Granny Bea’s dead garden, and the cracks in the world where grief lets the wrong things through. As Sherlyn begins to reveal the evil buried beneath Willet's Rest's churches, gardens, and good ol’ boy smiles, she has to decide whether her sister can still be saved—or whether saving Callie means admitting the thing wearing her face was invited in long before the revival ever began. Bunny Notaro's debut novel, Revival, is a Southern Gothic psychological horror story rooted in small-town life, generational trauma, and the quiet terror of realizing that some choices were made for you long before you were born.
Willet’s Rest holds many secrets, but perhaps none as strange as what Dr. Barty Kellis brings with him.
When portals to the world of Felafontia open and hamsters become men, receptionist Cambria Hawkins is forced to confront the impossible, even as she tries to stop apologizing for things that were never her fault. Nurse Baylee-Ann Cavins takes her fall through the portal the same way she takes everything else: with a tired shrug. And financial director Erin Sutton is already balancing marriage, motherhood, and life as a trans woman in a small town before magic begins tearing holes in the world she thought she knew. Together, they find themselves bound by far more than their jobs, and tasked with saving a world they were never meant to touch.
In the dead town of Willet’s Rest, the cornfields have withered, the mail has stopped, and the radio loops the same emergency broadcast beneath the name of Dear Leader. The Sickness has gutted whole counties. The Second Sons have dragged people from clinics, homes, and grocery-store parking lots.
Trans man Fletcher and his husband Henry have survived the end of America by staying quiet.
Or so Fletcher thought.
When strange warnings begin and Henry’s calm starts to split, Fletcher realizes his husband has been afraid of something far worse than the collapse around them, and it knows where to find them.
After a violent attack on their home, Fletcher must decide how much of the man he loves was ever true, and whether survival is worth the terrible thing Henry made him carry.
The Turning Days is a character-driven Southern psychological horror that explores what it means to finally accept the truth of the world around you, and finding peace amongst the horrors.