Lily Darling

Southing Lily Darling

Southing follows a cast of four characters who are all, either tangentially or directly, involved with the murder of a teenage girl, Jaime. Atticus is a young boy striving to see even the smallest forms of beauty in his crumbling hometown of Carrabelle, Florida. Categorically resisting labels of innocence or naïveté so often associated with youth, Atticus harbors a profound capacity for empathy that informs his observations with integrity that most are incapable of. Dewey, Atticus's older brother, had loved Jaime from afar. Dewey continues to struggle in hiding his grief from his cohort of ne'er-do-well friends, all of whom played a key role in ostracizing Jaime from the community before her death. Callie is the new girl in town, and her observations about Carrabelle's community are unobstructed as a result of her disinterest in integrating into the community. Fleeing a home as equally troubled as her past, Callie forms an unlikely friendship with her classmate, Annabelle Fairchild, the daughter of a rehabilitation facility tycoon. Then there's Newbury, an unknown man who arrives in Carrabelle with a stolen car, a pair of aviators, and a stomach filled with the pills he chews to keep his nightmarish visions of the apocalypse at bay. The four narrators, all strangers in one way or another, set out to discover the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jaime's murder and deal with the repercussions of her death.