Publisher's Synopsis
The Curse of the Color Indigo is a moody, sweat-soaked elegy-a Southern gothic tale wrapped in the flickering pulse of supernatural reckoning and the aching hush of forbidden love. Set in the smoldering summer of 1988 in a conservative Kentucky town that clings to its secrets like Spanish moss on old brick, this evocative coming-of-age novel follows seventeen-year-old Elijah, a quiet Black boy haunted by things too deep for language, and a love too dangerous to name.
Still grieving his estrangement from his mother and struggling to understand the wild flashes of indigo light that swell behind his eyes, Elijah keeps to himself. Until Theon, begins to crack open the silence he's built around his heart. Their connection is tentative, electric, and charged with a longing neither of them dares to admit aloud in a town where rumors linger longer than summer heat.
But when the body of a popular white cheerleader is found floating in the Licking River, their town is flung into fear and suspicion. And Elijah's visions, once dismissed as dreams, begin to sharpen into something far more urgent. With every flicker of indigo, he's drawn deeper into a mystery braided through bloodlines, backwoods rituals, and a violent ancestral cycle that demands the sacrifice of two teenagers every seventeen years.
Guided by Professor Langston, a once-retired mystic and scholar of forgotten folklore, Elijah uncovers a buried history of conjure, betrayal, and spectral revenge that seems to circle back to him and Theon. As spectral apparitions whisper in moonlit cornfields and the weight of generations presses down on the boys' shoulders, Elijah must reckon with his role in a ritual older than memory and more dangerous than desire.
In a world where being Black and queer is already a gamble, Elijah stands at the precipice of who he is and who he's allowed to be. As love and death twist through the air like Southern smoke, The Curse of the Color Indigo asks: what are we willing to risk to be seen, to be free, to love?
This is a story about firsts...first love, first loss, and the first time you realize that some legacies are meant to be broken, even if you have to burn the past to do it.
