Reckoning at Chauncey

De: Eric Key

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

On the night of August 20, 1925, in a small railroad town in Georgia, two men walked into a store—and both left it dying.

Edd Coogler was a farmer. A father of six. A quiet man not known for trouble.

Lester Montford was a deputy sheriff, a man of duty in a county where law and pride often stood uneasily beside one another.

Between them lay a grievance born days earlier at Jay Bird Springs—an insult carried forward through rumor, loyalty, and the unspoken rules of a Southern community. What happened next inside R. B. Kelly’s store would divide a town, shape generations of memory, and leave behind a story no two people would ever tell the same way.

Reckoning at Chauncey is a Southern Gothic novel rooted in documented events and family history. Drawing from the lives of Edd and Jess Coogler, Eric Wayne Key reconstructs a tragedy not as a single truth, but as a chorus of voices—each shaped by memory, bias, and the need to make sense of what cannot be undone.

This is not simply a story of violence.
It is a story of how violence begins.
Of how memory changes what it carries.
And of how the past refuses to stay buried.