The Autumn Moth

Some families spin webs strong enough to trap you for a lifetime. It takes something rare to tear them down.

Rudy Webb left the family farm outside Coaldale decades ago and never looked back. Not at his father, not at his brother Charlie, and not at the painful memories of the family he once loved. When a phone call summons him home, he finds the family he left behind little changed. His sister-in-law Dottie is brittle with old resentments. His niece Ophelia is drowning her wounds in wine. His nephew Julius is still fighting to become a better man than the one who raised him. And at the center of it all is Charlie, dying and finally ready to talk about the things this family has spent a lifetime refusing to say out loud.

Into this tangle of buried grief and inherited anger walks Crystal, Julius's fiancée. An outsider carrying scars of her own, she sees the Webbs with a clarity none of them can afford. "You've been summoned," Ophelia tells her, half-joking, half-serious. "You've been sent to destroy the web and defeat the spider."

She might be right.

The Autumn Moth is a quietly devastating novel about the stories families tell themselves to survive and what it costs to finally tell the truth. Unflinching, tender, and threaded with dark humor, it asks whether forgiveness is even possible for people who were never taught how to love well, and whether healing can begin the moment someone from outside is brave enough to fly in.