Launching September 8, 2025
Where the Light Flickers
by
Ryan Burden
A haunting, viscerally powerful novel that explores rural violence, family betrayal, and the quiet desperation of lives trapped between loyalty and survival.
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In the shadowed hollows of Appalachia, two families exist on opposite sides of an invisible line. Hem, a disgraced veterinarian, struggles to keep his family intact after his daughter elopes with a local miner and his young son suffers a devastating injury. Up the mountain, Spoon Sullivan rules the region's criminal underworld with calculated brutality, while his wife Fay retreats into addiction and their son Mason begins to question everything he's been taught.
When Hem's son rescues a wounded dog from the Sullivan compound, the fragile boundaries between these families collapse. What follows is a collision of lives marked by desperation, violence, and the human need for freedom at any cost.
As floodwaters rise and tensions build, each character faces impossible choices between loyalty and survival. Parents fail their children. Children betray their parents. And throughout it all, the animals they keep become mirrors for their own caged existence.
In sparse, luminous prose, Ryan Burden traces how the pursuit of freedom can lead to even deeper confinement, and how sometimes the only escape comes through destruction. Where the Light Flickers is a searing portrait of rural lives caught in the machinery of circumstance—a novel that examines what happens when the light of hope appears just long enough to reveal the darkness.
PRAISE FOR WHERE THE LIGHT FLICKERS
"Ryan Burden writes with a dazzling combination of stoic restraint, profound insight, and poignant lyricism. This is big-hearted, undaunted, and epic storytelling miraculously broken into small, intimate canvases, all emblazoned with some of the finest sentences I've ever seen from a debut novelist. Where the Light Flickers is a meditative, spellbinding work about the complicated and often impossible moral dilemmas facing those struggling to survive in a marginalized, forgotten place."
—Dean Bakopoulos, author of Please Don't Come Back From the Moon, My American Unhappiness, and Summerlong
""A book of messy lives immaculately told, WHERE THE LIGHT FLICKERS is lyric, wise, and, not least, thrilling. Ryan Burden is a masterful craftsman and this debut is the exquisite result."
— Liam Callanan, author of When in Rome and Paris by the Book.
About Ryan
Ryan Burden is a middle school teacher, a doctor of English and Creative Writing, and a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. His short story "Coming of Age" won Redivider's 2016 Beacon Street Prize for fiction. His novel Orphans was shortlisted for the 2024 Steel Toe Books Prose Award. Other work has appeared in Switchback, Gulf Stream, and JMWW, among others. He lives in Boston, MA.
