When Natacha Miller is asked to replace a mysteriously absent professor at a Florida college, she doesn’t exactly want the job. However, with a little coaxing from the department chair, she reluctantly agrees. For most genre fans, teaching ‘Literature of Horror and the Supernatural’ sounds like a dream – but for Natacha, it is the beginning of a living nightmare.
Douglas Ford’s latest novel, The Bloody Bucket, takes place in Vissaria – a fictional Florida county and magnet for the strange and supernatural. The college is no exception. Natacha’s new role includes advising the Horror and Occult League, a student group dedicated to putting together an elaborate haunted house for the community. After a hurricane exhumes old structural remains in the nearby woods, Natacha’s students become obsessed with the local lore of “The Bloody Bucket.” They pivot to make it the theme for their haunted house. But despite the young professor’s reluctance, the League is too captivated to take ‘no’ for an answer.
Readers soon learn that Bloody Bucket was once a lively juke joint in the 1930s. During Prohibition, it was a haven for music, drinking, and prostitution. While these were well-known activities inside the establishment, the lesser-known involved tough decisions, hardship, and heartache. Run by a woman called Bon Manman, the Bloody Bucket offered abortions to women, often prostitutes. Helping women in dire straits eventually led to Bon Manman’s own violent demise. While the dark and tragic story might be a legend, Natacha realizes that even lore has a way of bleeding into reality.
“Our lives, our stories – you don’t know them. They don’t belong to you. Our bodies don’t belong to you.” –The Bloody Bucket by Douglas Ford
Facing her own painful trauma in search of forgiveness, Natacha finds her life entangled with the story of Bon Maman, a troubled student named Isis, and a dangerous prisoner – all while caring for her younger brother. As a young Black woman and second-generation Haitian-American, Natacha’s journey provides an engrossing look at the complexities of the immigrant experience and the inherited history of one’s home.
The Bloody Bucket peels back the skin of Florida’s past – a history that is often left out of the textbooks in the hopes it may remain buried. Ford expertly layers trauma, racial tension, multicultural experiences, and folklore into an engrossing Southern Gothic novel of profound proportions. As history often is, this tale is not for the faint of heart. But The Bloody Bucket is essential horror reading, especially given the times we find ourselves in.
The Bloody Bucket is available everywhere books are sold.
Douglas Ford writes horror fiction, often covering a wide spectrum of styles, from the quiet corners of the uncanny, to the outer extremes where the blood runs thick and red. His work has won awards and received praise for venturing into the occult wilds of folk horror and southern gothic. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies, magazines, and podcasts, as well as three collections, Ape in the Ring and Other Tales of the Macabre and Uncanny, The Infection Party and Other Stories of Dis-Ease, and most recently, Let’s Cut Up Dad! and Other Stories of Transgressive Madness. His longer works include The Beasts of Vissaria County, Little Lugosi (A Love Story), The Trick, and Who Dies First. He lives on the west coast of Florida.
Visit Douglas Ford at his website and on social media.
