The Breath Beneath

A Southern Gothic Horror Novel of a Drowned Plantation and the Divers Who Wake It

By: James Farris

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In 1962, the Army Corps of Engineers flooded a Louisiana plantation to build a reservoir. No one asked why the demolition foreman refused, on his own authority, to set a single charge before it went under — whole, cabins and all.

Sixty-four years later, a reclusive benefactor has funded an expedition to bring it back into the light. Twenty of the world's best deep-water specialists — an exorcist-diver, a hospice nun, a trauma surgeon, a Korean shaman working a tradition never built for this kind of water, a historian carrying two hundred and thirteen names no one has spoken aloud in a century and a half — descend to a Greek Revival mansion sitting at the bottom of Lac Cheniere-Mortier in flawless, unnatural preservation.

The shutters are still green. The dining table is set for six. The front door has been sealed for sixty-four years — and it opens for them on its own, the moment they arrive.

Something has been keeping this house standing. Something has been waiting a very long time for exactly this kind of company.

Over twenty-six days at the bottom of a Louisiana lake, the team will learn that the plantation's dead were never fully gone — and that not everyone who came down with the expedition is going home. To surface again, they will have to do the one thing no training, no faith, and no amount of expertise has ever prepared any of them for: speak every name this house has swallowed, and face what it's still owed.

The Breath Beneath is a slow-drowning Southern Gothic horror novel about historical reckoning, the patience of old debts, and what it costs to finally say a name someone once tried to erase.