Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, gaslamp, Gothic, historical fantasy, horror, Southern fiction
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on October 21, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Ignyte and Mythopoeic Award-winning author Eden Royce pens a Southern Gothic historical fantasy story of a contentious funeral in her adult fiction debut.
Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. Coddled to within an inch of her life by a mother who refuses to let her daughter live a life other than the one she dictates, Phee yearns to demonstrate she's capable of more than simply marrying well.
When word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother's wrath to step up and accept the role of pomp―the highly honored duty of planning the funeral service. Traveling alone to the town of Horizon and her aunt's unsettling home, Phee soon discovers that visions and shadows beckon from every reflective surface, and that some secrets transcend the borders of life and death.
My Review:
I didn’t know what I was getting into with this book. I’ll confess that I picked it up because it was short and fantastical and that was exactly what I was in the mood for. It turned out to be fantastic and beautiful in ways that I was not expecting it all. But was so very happy to read.
From one perspective, this is a story about family ties that bind and strangle. From another, it’s a coming of age and into power story about a young woman who must break away from those family ties to save herself.
It’s also a story about passing on and paying forward, set in a time and place where the magical flows through the mundane, and each acknowledges what they owe the other.
The story begins with Phaedra St. Margaret, known as Phee to her family and the few friends her harridan of a mother allows her to have. Which is where Phee’s internal struggle begins and so often ends.
Phee, a bright and restless 21-year-old in the Reconstruction city of New Charleston, wants more out of life than her overbearing, oppressive mother will EVER allow her to have. Phee wants to work, for herself, for her independence, for the betterment of her race.
Her mother wants her to remain under her thumb for the rest of their lives – and quite probably after. And has been doing her damndest to make sure that happens, by any means available to her.
Which is where the messenger steps into the scene with news of Phee’s beloved Aunt Cleo’s death. Phee may have loved her Aunt, but her mother never forgave her sister for a long ago transgression and exiled her, not just from the family but from the city of New Charleston and seemingly even from being mentioned within the confines of the family home except for continued excoriation.
But someone needs to be the chief mourner, celebrant and arranger for Aunt Cleo’s funeral. In other words, someone needs to serve as the psychopomp – or pomp – for her homegoing. It’s a prestigious thing to do, but it is also an occasion for judgement by the community with the potential for social and even criminal punishment if the pomp fails to do right by the dead.
Phee takes on the duty that should be her mother’s. But her mother refuses to do right by her own sister. Phee can’t let that stand, nor can she let the opportunity go by. No matter how much her mother has filled her head and heart with the idea that she is incapable of filling this important role and seeing it through.
And that’s where the magic comes in.
In spite of her inexperience, her trepidation, and the little voice in her head that sounds exactly like her mother telling her that she is incapable of the job, Phee sets out for her Aunt’s house in not-too-distant Horizon, and there she discovers EVERYTHING.
The magic her Aunt created, the beauty of the task and the service she has agreed to and wants to perform, the truth about the family scandal that drove her aunt away, the desperate lengths her mother has resorted to in order to ensure that Phee follows the path she has decided upon for her, and the strength within herself to see both her own task through – along with the duty that her aunt left to her knowing that it would be fulfilled.
Not just out of duty, but out of love.
Escape Rating A-: This turned out to be an utterly beautiful story, but it started out in a very dark place – as does Phee. It takes her quite a while – and a fair number of chapters – to dig herself out of the slough of despond, obedience and oppression that her mother has put her in – and it’s the making of her in more ways than one.
But it’s a VERY hard row to hoe, and a deeper rut to climb out of than Phee ever imagined.
At first, this part of the story resembled just the kind of story that drives me bananas, as it digs deep into all the ways that living while female creates painful struggles for female protagonists, especially in historical fiction, that I KNOW happened but as a reader I’m losing patience with reading in detail.
While Phee, as a young black woman, would have even more to contend with from society’s expectations of her due to her race and her gender, in the story the oppression and expectation that Phee has to fight against seems to ALL come from her mother so it reads in this particular story as more closely gender based. Your reading mileage may vary.
Her mother, a malignant narcissist of the first water, is really the villain of this piece and the reader starts wanting Phee to break away from the very first page. It’s clear fairly early on that part of the magical realism of this story is that her mother is using some kind of magic to bend Phee to her will. There’s a deep well of something awful in her mother that we don’t get to explore in detail but we know means Phee outright harm and we’re pulling for her to get away from the beginning.
The real magic of the story takes place once Phee gets to her Aunt’s place in Horizon. Neither Horizon nor New Charleston exist on any map, but do bear a strong resemblance to the magical and magically hidden black communities of Leslye Penelope’s Daughter of the Merciful Deep, while this story takes that element and combines it with the death magic of C.L. Polk’s Hugo Nominated short stories, St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid and Ivy, Angelica Bay.
So if you liked those you’ll like this and vice versa.
Besides Phee’s mother, the thing that drove me a bit nuts about this story – while adding oodles to the depth of it – was that while I understood the cultural importance of the homegoing, and the particular magic in the context of this story, there was an element to Phee’s taking up of that duty that carried greater social consequences, to the point of potentially criminal charges, if Phee failed that there just wasn’t enough room in the novella to explain.
As always, I just wanted more backstory for that bit, and there wasn’t quite enough space for it. It didn’t stop my enjoyment of and immersion in the story at all, it just left my wishing for a bit more. As I do. Likewise, I’d have loved to have seen Phee making all the decisions and arrangements once she decided to partner with Cross Prioleau as the funeral director to carry out Phee’s – and her Aunt’s – wishes. If only because I hoped for a whole bunch of scenes where all the pretentious asshats who believed they could run roughshod over Phee got their comeuppances.
Also, it’s clear from the story that Phee and Cross are going to become partners in both work and life and I wouldn’t have minded seeing a bit more of that AT ALL.
Nevertheless, the ending was marvelously cathartic, for Phee and for the reader. Phee has come into herself, and in planning and carrying out her beloved Aunt’s homegoing, Phee has finally come home to a place, a purpose and a life that will fill her heart and fulfill her dreams.
The Sullivan's Island Supper Club: A Carolina Tale by 
In the first book in this very cozy mystery series, 
Escape Rating B-: I picked this up because I’ve really enjoyed the author’s 
The story this time around is told in first-person, as this author’s stories often are, but in this case it was multiple first persons. For each month – and each supper club meeting – in the months preceding the ‘main event’, we get a chapter from each of the core members of the group, from their individual points of view, focusing on the individual crises in their lives that includes a personal mystery in each case. I found some of their personal trials and tribulations more involving than others – and I expect that will be true for most readers, albeit mixed somewhat differently based on the reader.
Big Trouble on Sullivan's Island (Carolina Tales Book 1) by 
Glory Road by 
Escape Rating B+: This was, just like my reading of 
My Sweet Vidalia by 