Time Conjurer

A happy little girl haunts Kenny's dreams. When a new dream indicates the death of a family member, he learns that the girl reaching out to him in his dreams is an aunt who disappeared in 1955. The aunt's sister, his grandmother, teaches him a method of Hoodoo-based time travel so he can visit the past. When his grandmother is attacked by the woman responsible for Delilah's disappearance, they must go back to 1955 Charleston. Kenny and his grandmother navigate the Jim Crow South to prevent their evil visitor from finding her way back to 2019 and to find Delilah, who is lost in a time labyrinth. Unfortunately, changing the past creates new terrors that ripple through time and jeopardize the reality of 2019. Kenny must embrace Hoodoo's deeper traditions to save the people and the world he knows.

Kenny Lawson is an unfulfilled, repressed psychiatrist in Philadelphia who has been haunted by premonitions since childhood. Dreams of a little girl at play are his only nocturnal escape. One night, the girl brings him a message of death. His Hoodoo-practicing Nana reveals that the girl in his dreams is actually her sister Delilah, who disappeared in 1955. She shows him how to visit lost loved ones using "flying," a time travel method she has recently developed. Dogged by a lifetime of relentless humiliation at the hand of his older brother, Kenny "flies" to his childhood. As a boy he had saved his only brother from a fire, but this time he let him die. This changed Kenny into the self-assured man who acquired the woman of his dreams and created a blissful life. It also changed the world around him. Nana saw it all and rebuked him. Before Kenny can restore his old life, Nana is attacked by a foe from 1955 who has somehow discovered their time travel technique. Nana is convinced that her sister is still alive and suspects that her foe will return to look for her. She asks Kenny to join in her search for Delilah, which will take them to Jim Crow's Charleston. There, Kenny and Nana must navigate Jim Crow lynchings, vengeful curses, and the intricacies of Hoodoo magic. As they search for Delilah and try to keep villains in the past, they learn that changing the past has horrifying implications for the future.

Michael Arthur Kennedy is an Occupational Medicine physician born in Cambridge, Massachusetts with maternal roots in Charleston, South Carolina. He loves jazz, photography, and historical fiction.