Kenneth Penn’s Mississippi Wizards is a supernatural horror novel built around two women whose lives are separated by time but connected by violence, grief, and a persistent ghost named Nancy. In the present-day storyline, Cassandra and her husband, Ben, head into Mississippi’s De Soto National Forest for what should be a quiet camping trip, only to become targets of a vicious group of white supremacists. Running alongside that ordeal is Liza’s story, set two years earlier, as she navigates family conflict, first love, racism, homophobia, and an escalating threat that follows her into the same wilderness. The alternating perspectives gradually reveal that these aren’t simply parallel stories. They’re pieces of one supernatural puzzle.

Cassandra is the novel’s strongest anchor. She’s funny, impatient, frightened, loving, and stubborn enough to keep moving long after most people would collapse. Her relationship with Ben gives the early chapters warmth and playful energy, which makes the brutality that follows feel personal. Penn also handles Cassandra’s belief that she has schizophrenia with care. For years, she’s understood Nancy as a hallucination produced by trauma, so discovering that the ghost is real doesn’t instantly erase the emotional and physical consequences of her diagnosis. That tension gives the haunting an unusually intimate quality.

Liza’s chapters bring a different kind of pressure. Her romance with Mary is tender and believable, while her relationship with her family, especially her cousin Avery, is full of affection, betrayal, fear, and compromised loyalties. The novel’s racism and homophobia are direct, ugly forces expressed through individual choices and family histories. Penn ties those forces to the supernatural plot without turning them into abstract symbols. Early in the book, Nancy observes, “Change always comes too late for the innocent,” a line that captures the story’s grief while also setting up its interest in whether the past can be confronted, altered, or redeemed.

The book moves like a survival thriller once Cassandra and Ben are attacked, with chases, beatings, escapes, crashes, and confrontations arriving in quick succession. Its horror is physical and graphic, but the stranger element is the gradual collapse of time around the forest. Images, songs, locations, and memories echo between Cassandra’s and Liza’s experiences until the two timelines finally meet. That structure rewards attention, and the final explanation gives earlier scenes new meaning. The book is generous with action and emotional intensity, though its extended confrontations sometimes leave little room to recover before the next crisis begins.

What stayed with me most was the novel’s belief in connection. Cassandra, Liza, and Nancy are all carrying pain that began with someone else’s cruelty, yet their eventual strength comes from trusting and helping one another. That makes Mississippi Wizards more than a story about escaping killers or solving a haunting. It’s a dark, energetic novel about trauma traveling through time, love surviving hostile circumstances, and people finding the power to change a tragedy that once seemed permanent. Its closing scene lands with a welcome sense of wonder, leaving the characters on the edge of a new relationship and one very strange story still waiting to be told.

Pages: 333 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0H8KBZR6R