Janice Daugharty: 80 books

On a Saturday morning drunk, the Count and his grown son Lucky stumble onto a black woman's shack in the quarters of Cornerville to pilfer for food. When she happens up on them, the Count pulls out his pocket knife and cuts her throat. They go to jail but not for long because the Count's brother King, as usual, gets them out. But the old lady's not done with them. Especially Lucky.

In the tradition of Eudora Welty, "Beck and Barn" is an old-timey love story marked by ironic exaggerated devotion. After Barney dies, Becky goes to visit her sister; when she returns, she finds that her no-account "baby" brother has burned her house and with it her only picture...

Rural mail carrier, Tammy, bumps heads in a nightmare during a rare spring snow storm. Twenty years before, she was kidnapped and shot by a drug addict she met along her route. Now she picks up another stranger along her route and the memories come flooding back. Is she about to be kidnapped and shot again? No, she tells herself, because the odds against it are so great.

First published in STORY Trish is the community dopehead and bad mother, out on a winter evening to give Bub, her third child away. Her last stop is at her x-inlaws, who have taken Trish's two little girls the year before. Trish, smoking her final cigarette, displays her Bub's burns and bruises on his backside. Who did it? She doesn't know...so she makes up a story.

Davey follows Jack along the river bank to their favorite fishing spot, but things aren't how they used to be. Jack has married Davey's sister the night before and that's all Davey can think about, even as they follow the smell of sweet-ripe honey and the sound of swarming bees to the tree with the honey.

Hun is ninety-some-odd years old and at the mercy of a bitter, controlling black woman hired by the family to keep their beloved relative at home till she dies. When Hun's two grand-nieces show up one fall morning for a visit, the caregiver cranks her meanness up a notch. She gets them told! Hun cries...

Known only as "Sister," the girl watches her wicked step-daddy sack up her cats to toss in the river. As Sister says though, "This isn't the worst thing William B. Blaine ever did." She hopes this pet sacrifice proves enough to cause her mother to make him go. Sister is obcessed...

Following a family reunion, Gransallie learns that her favorite niece, Ophelia, ia a not only a school teacher but a nudist. Hating to be proved wrong, Gransallie tries to defend Ophelia to her granddaughters, who "don't care where they are going or what shape they arrive in as long as they are...

Outside the church it is freezing, raining, but inside Lavonia is doing just fine. She is seated on the first pew in her widow's weeds facing the casket of her x-husband and his common-law wife in the choir. Young Betty will have her day in the seat of honor for another dead man. Then the two women...

Eileen and Duck Dixon were on the verge of splitting up before they learned they'd won the Easter Lottery. Now they're stuck. Then they discover a missing ticket out of the twenty-five each bought. So who actually owns the winning ticket? To make matters worse, Eileen's mother Nell had loaned them the money to buy the tickets. By rights, does the winning ticket belong to her?

Bethann, a struggling college student, decides to take care of Holly, her evil, manipulative younger sister after their grandmother, who raised them, dies. But Holly is a mess. And en route to Miami after the funeral, Bethann lays down the rules to Holly, while mentally trying to understand what makes Holly tick. If Bethann can figure her out she can fix her. So she thinks.

"Grannie has bad skin cancers but not bad enough to take her out of this world" where nobody wants her except one granddaughter. Luzanne drives her from house to house belonging to Grannie's three daughters, but each refuses to take her. It is while "visiting" Imo that the old lady finds a final rest while trailing a yellow cat out to a sunny porch.

No longer a Paul-Newman playboy type, who used to leave his family waiting and wondering, Elec now prides himself on "making trades" at the various houses along the rural routes where he works. For instance, at the home of June Bug and Candy, while June Bug is away, Elec talks Candy into...

From "Lovie's Baby": "They said they saw her that Monday morning running up the road toward the courthouse, with that pink blanket all nussed-up to her bosom like the baby was still alive. And it SOME cold..."