Romer Shaw
Born in New Orleans, Romer Shaw is a historical fiction writer. He is considered a leader in the modern Southern Gothic Revival.
Having lived, worked, and traveled extensively throughout the American Deep South and Latin America, his work primarily focuses on two areas: the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, and the relationship between the United States and Latin America and the effect American Imperialism has had on those countries. He is deeply passionate about Anthropology and American-Southern History. His favorite backdrop for any novel is the Mississippi Delta, the area between Memphis and New Orleans.
Romer's next novel, Hard Killin' Floor, will be available in September of 2025.
Check out: www.romershaw.com
Romer can be contacted directly at: romershaw@gmail.com
CURRENT Works
The Green Apple Sea
In the summer of 1944, with the world at war and the Mississippi River boiling beneath her boots, Brenda Wellers runs a rusted riverboat alone. Once petite and pretty, she’s now all grit and grease—hauling freight, dodging men who don’t think she belongs, and mourning a brother swallowed by a foreign sea.
But when a final telegram arrives—one last death she can’t stomach—Brenda does the unthinkable. With the docks of New Orleans behind her and a fading dream ahead, she turns the bow of the Clara June toward the open Gulf, chasing a place she once read about in a torn magazine...a place called The Green Apple Sea.
What follows is a haunting and lyrical journey of defiance, grief, and the quiet longing to disappear. Part Southern Gothic, part river-noir elegy, this novella burns slow and deep—like diesel in the blood.
ISBN: 979-8-9897952-8-4, 74 pages (novella)
In for a Penny
The law took their land. Hunger took their daughter. What they took back couldn’t be measured in dollars.
Set in Depression-era Mississippi, In for a Penny is a Southern Gothic tragedy steeped in vengeance, sorrow, and fire. When sharecropping brothers John and Lowell Tucker finally purchase the land their family bled on for generations, it feels like freedom. But when the banks come calling and the Great Depression devours everything they've built, the Tuckers are forced to watch their children go cold—and bury a little girl by the creek that once marked their property line.
What begins as grief becomes legend. The brothers turn outlaw, striking back at the men who profit off the poor and leaving behind a single penny at every scene—a copper curse, a promise of retribution.
But vengeance, once lit, burns more than its target.
Romer Shaw weaves a haunting, lyrical tale of justice gone feral. Equal parts Robin Hood and Cain and Abel, In for a Penny is a blood-soaked hymn for the voiceless—and a warning that no land stays quiet forever.
ISBN: 979-8-9897952-4-6, 54 pages (novella)
In the fading heat of a Mississippi September, fourteen-year-old Ann sits on her grandmother’s porch, watching a circle of women shell beans, swap stories, and stitch together the history of a family—and a town—that refuses to reckon with the truth.
But when news breaks of a bombing in Birmingham that leaves four Black girls dead, the porch becomes a crucible. Old wounds resurface. Loyalties fracture. And Ann, caught between silence and awakening, must decide what kind of woman she will become.
Told in the tender, unflinching voice of a girl standing on the edge of becoming, Salted with Fire is a powerful portrait of Southern womanhood, quiet rebellion, and the fire that refines but does not destroy. In a world divided by custom and cowardice, one girl learns that righteousness doesn’t whisper—it burns.
ISBN: 979-8-9897952-0-8, 125 pages (novella)
Appetite for Violence - A Zee Blackwell Story
AVAILABLE AUGUST, 2025.
They want to hang the boy.
And in this part of Mississippi, that’s easier than proving the truth.
Seventeen-year-old Reggie “Turbo” Collins has been arrested for murder. The sheriff says it’s open and shut. The rope’s already tied. But Zee Blackwell knows better. Turbo’s not just another street kid—he’s Zee’s shadow, his runner, his only tether to the part of himself that still believes in redemption.
To save him, Zee will have to follow the blood trail through crooked lawmen, backroom deals, and a town that feeds off fear. And the deeper he digs, the clearer it becomes: somebody wants this boy to swing.
Set in the searing heat of the 1960s Delta, Appetite for Violence is a Southern Noir thriller about loyalty, corruption, and the quiet fury of a man who doesn’t bluff, doesn’t beg—and doesn’t forget.
ISBN: 979-8-9897952-7-7, 184 pages
THE HOUNDED SLAVE
In the sultry shadows of 1960s Mississippi, Hollis Lane returns to a land he tried to forget, only to find the ghosts of blood and memory waiting beneath every root and rooftop. A scholar of history and son of the Delta, Hollis is caught between the quiet ache of the past and the brutal clarity of the present—between the pull of his brother Carter and the fire of Louisa, a woman unafraid to challenge every lie the South was built upon.
As the cotton fields bloom and the hounds begin to howl, love becomes dangerous, silence turns deadly, and buried sins rise like smoke. What follows is a reckoning—of family, of race, of history itself.
Told in a voice both haunted and lyrical, The Hounded Slave is a Southern Gothic elegy about what it means to inherit shame, carry hope, and try—against every storm and scar—to stand.
ISBN: 979-8-9897952-0-8, 108 pages (novella)
GHOSTS IN THE COTTON - THE DELTA COLLECTION
In the still, haunted fields between Memphis and New Orleans—where cotton once ruled and blood still remembers—Ghosts in the Cotton gathers stories of the Mississippi Delta like heirloom seeds: tender, brutal, and full of truth.
From the quiet desperation of a young boy in Clarksdale to the righteous fury of tenant farmers in Tunica, Romer Shaw’s Delta Collection explores the lives of those too often buried beneath the silence of history. Here, men break under the weight of shame, women rise against the thorns of tradition, and the dead don’t stay quiet for long.
Told in a voice with the rhythm of a preacher and the rawness of a field hand, these stories reckon with race, poverty, pride, and place—where family binds, memory burns, and every grave is a question left unanswered.
Ghosts in the Cotton is a Southern elegy and a battle hymn. A tribute to those who endured—and a reckoning for those who did not.
ISBN: 979-8-9897952-1-5, 225 pages
HARD KILLIN' FLOOR - A SOUTHERN GOTHIC NOIR NOVEL
AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 1, 2025.
The body of Elliot Glass is found face-down in the dirt behind a Clarksdale juke joint, one shoe missing and no one asking questions. The sheriff calls it just another dead Black man. Case closed.
But Elliot wasn’t nobody. He was somebody up in Memphis—somebody with ties, somebody with dirt, somebody white folks can’t afford to ignore.
As the Delta heat rises, so do the lies. A Black mortician, a white waitress, and a schoolteacher with secrets all find themselves tangled in a murder that wasn’t meant to matter—but won’t stay buried. There’s a deputy with blood on his hands, a politician scrambling to cover his tracks, and a woman who saw too much and lived to tell it.
In a land where the dead don’t get justice and the living don’t get clean, one truth echoes through the cotton and the blood:
The wrong man. The wrong woman. The wrong place to die.
ISBN: 979-8-9897952-2-2, 287 pages
TEN YEARS OF SPRING - CONSIDERED FOR THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION
In 1950s Guatemala—where fruit rots slower than truth—Connor Caine returns to the plantations of his youth, trading Ivy League ambition for exile in a land where revolution simmers in the shade of the banana groves. Once the son of a United Fruit executive, now a reluctant plantation boss, Connor finds himself caught between the ghosts of empire, the fire of a woman named Abigail, and the coming storm of the CIA-backed coup.
As the nation teeters on the edge of liberation and betrayal, Connor must choose between the wealth that made him and the people who raised him. In a world where nothing is as it seems—and everyone is expendable—love becomes treason, and silence, a kind of sin.
Told with unflinching honesty and poetic force, Ten Years of Spring is a haunting meditation on power, privilege, and the cost of doing nothing.
ISBN: 979-8-9857170-0-6, 388 pages