JASON TAYLOR MORGAN’S BOOKS

During the Civil War, twenty-five magical Johnson women hiding from Sherman’s Army were killed in the family up mountain cemetery. Since then, the slain Johnsons have haunted it and turned it into powerful healing ground, known as the Red Field.

Settled deep in 1928 Appalachia, each of the 1,199 townspeople of Redemption knows that nineteen-year-old Ruby Johnson, the last descendant of the Johnson witches, is a witch-healer—and revile her for it—but they need her just as they had generations of magical Johnson kinswomen before her. Wanting her own life, her own identity, to follow her own dreams, Ruby is reluctant to follow in her ancestors’ infamous steps.

Living amid the poverty, sexism, violence and ignorance of Appalachia during the early Twentieth Century, overnight, Ruby’s world changes radically. A series of family tragedies and historical events overrun her. The first, when she is 15, after the death of her magical mother, Ruby is thrust into the role of being parent and provider for her five younger brothers and sisters and senile Civil War granddaddy. At her tender age, Ruby must take responsibility for overseeing and protecting the whole Johnson world.

Married, pregnant, and raising her young siblings herself, Ruby and her family are “broke as sin with no Redeemer comin’.” When the U.S. government orders Ruby and her family off Redemption Mountain, where the Johnson family has lived for centuries, she digs in her heels, stopping at nothing—and even calling on the magic of the Red Field for help—to protect what’s hers.

With a supporting cast of vivid and eccentric characters, Ruby is a strong, resourceful young woman, defying the harsh odds of the early 20th Century American South. Ruby’s journey is full of hardship, beauty and magic and surviving despite fierce adversity. It is half survival and half destiny fulfilled. Jason Taylor Morgan’s debut novel The Red Field is not to be missed.

Fifty-year-old Bostonian John G.F. O’Rourke wakes up one morning suddenly dissatisfied with the normalcy of his life. A man grounded in corporate America, he resigns his big career, sells his waterfront condominium, and puts his possessions in storage.

In his blood red BMW 525i, with the clothes on his back and a wallet full of gold cards, he sets off on a journey to discover his mother’s Southern roots and Cherokee heritage, and his own meaning and purpose and place in the world.

What he finds is his granddaddy, a crass, semi-literate, 111-year-old magic man of huge eccentricity and few words, Clovis Midnight Moon.O’Rourke’s mostly Cherokee grandfather is the mysterious and legendary Unkillable Indian of Bone Creek, Virginia.

For fifty years in the early twentieth century, towing a mobile shooting gallery all over the South, Granddaddy let people step up to take their shot at him—literally—to kill him.O’Rourke accompanies Granddaddy on his final tour as the Unkillable Indian.

Then, O’Rourke’s real journey begins when he steps up to take on the mantle as The New Unkillable Indian. In an eccentric, magical, entertaining and implausible spiritual journey,

O'Rourke finally finds what he is looking for. Even—especially— that a crass, 'worthless' bigot of a granddaddy can be a magnificent spiritual teacher.

And, what you are looking for you already have…but finding it will knock your world off its axis.

In Book 2 of The Redemption Mountain Collection, high mountain Appalachian girl Aniah Galcinda Moray is twelve years old when the Confederate Home Guard kills her family—her magical Johnson mother, her Melungeon father, her two brothers, and the baby. Perched high above the scene in a tree house when the massacre takes place, Aniah and her deaf and mute little sister Gracie watch in horrified silence as violent men destroy their world and set the two young girls off on a perilous journey to survive the outer world at the beginning of the American Civil War.

Thrust from their home, Aniah and Gracie travel across the war-torn 1861 American South, heading for Redemption Mountain, where the magical Johnson kinswomen—their only living family, and the only place they will be safe—reside. Being of Melungeon descent, a mythical tri-race of Appalachian people, Aniah has the skin of a black woman, the “sunshine black” hair of Native American descent, and the bright blue eyes of a European.

Straddling races and worlds, Aniah’s journey is fraught with hostility, racial tension, the violence of war, coming to terms with her magical abilities, and the ticking awareness of her developing body in a world where men take what they want, especially from a pretty, young mixed-blood girl like Aniah.

Jason Taylor Morgan’s Still River draws on the magical realism, deep character development and beautiful language of its predecessor and book 1 of the series, The Red Field. Still River is an excellent next installment to the much-loved Redemption Mountain series.

Set in 1973, MAGNIFICENT AMONG THE ANGELFISH is the story of 15-year-old James Freer, a lifelong resident of the Elsie Whitney Psychiatric Hospital and School in Magnolia Massachusetts. Suffering from Capgras Syndrome, a condition where the sufferer believes life is full of impostors; James is an excessively bright, vocal, imaginative, charming and irreverent young man.

James’ worldview straddles the line between sanity and insanity in insightful and unique ways, always with his ferociously satirical sense of humor.

The first person narrative presents reality through James’ eyes and through his uniquely perceptive albeit inconsistent mind. The story’s main storyline reflects James’ inner (and eventually, outer) journey.

Does he want to try to become sane enough to live out in what he calls Reality USA, life outside the hospital’s boundaries?

Or stay in his safe, eccentric world in the hospital where sanity is fleeting, and imagination is real?

A cast of deeply troubled kids, invisible staff and a million rules to break, surround James. Yet, in his charming, off-center way, he finds enough peace to justify his next assault on happiness and challenge to his fleeting sanity.

In Book 3 of The Redemption Mountain Collection, an allegorical fantasy and retelling of The Book of Genesis, Appalachian style, African American child Annabelle Rose Cass is eleven years old when the Ku Klux Klan destroy her sweet small world and kill her large family―her brother, John Thomas, the lone survivor.

As a ghost, Annabelle Rose tells their story: brother and sister thrown out of Paradise into the hostile world of the 1920s white Conservative Christian South. Embittered and hateful from the attack, sweet-natured John Thomas is beyond Annabelle’s best ghostly efforts to stop him from avenging their loss and falling into dire and murderous darkness.

On her unexpectedly eccentric afterlife journey, Annabelle Rose meets God. (Yes, him.) A trillion-year-old skinny, banjo-pickin’, black man―Old Lordy―is not coping well after a million years of boredom, and now growing dementia. He is not only searching for a replacement before his mind slips completely―with Annabelle Rose his new associate, they walk the earth (an epic one square mile) deciding what to do with disappointing humanity. And will a sassy, precocious, eleven-year-old black child become God, the Female?

With great imagination, Black Angels, another of Jason Taylor Morgan’s deeply character-driven magical narratives, offers wide literary scope of heartbreak and vengeance, warmth and insight, mysticism and humor.