In this companion volume to the popular GHOST DOGS OF THE SOUTH, award-winning folklorist Randy Russell presents more than 20 original stories of cats who reach between the worlds of life and death. Each story is birthed from existing folklore, noted incidents of ghost cats, and first-person accounts. No mere compendium of reported incidents and sightings, this ghostly volume introduces the reader to the fuller circumstances and personalities of known encounters with cats who have landed on their feet in the afterlife.
Randy Russell has believed in ghosts since having to take the trash out at night when he was 12 and being chased back to the house by "something" in the darkness.
The Edgar-nominated author of five published novels for adults, two books of short stories about ghosts, and two volumes of Southern Appalachia folklore, Randy's first paranormal novel, Dead Rules , will be released in hardcover by HarperTeen on June 21, 2011.
Randy is an academically trained folklorist who has collected hundreds of first-person accounts of ghost experiences from across the South. He presents regularly on "True Ghost Stories of the South" based on his interviews of people who have encountered ghosts.
" I know what a ghost encounter is like for the people who have experienced them," Randy said in a recent interview. "But I have always wondered what the experience is like for the ghost and what it is like to be a ghost.
"By far, the most common ghost a person is likely to encounter is that of a loved one. Love is the binding element, in the main, that keeps a person hanging around after death. I wrote Dead Rules so I could learn what being a ghost might be like. I set it in a high school for the dead, because high school is when most of us are learning what love is... what it can be... and what it isn't. It seems so unfair to die in high school."
"I write ghosts and dead people," Randy said, "but my overriding concern in fiction is coming to an understanding of love. I figure each of us will fully understand what love is about 100 years after we're dead. In that case, ghosts know. And I want to know what they know. "
Randy lives outside Asheville, North Carolina, near the end of a shady mountain cove road marked by a sign that reads "No Exit." Randy thinks this means he will live forever.
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