A Brother to Dragons, and Other Old-Time Tales

This collection by Amélie Rives, a pioneer of Southern Gothic fiction, threads the needle between the macabre and the romantic. The title story casts Anthony Butter, a gardener in 1580s England, as an unlikely narrator drawn into a ghostly vendetta involving Lady Margaret and her wayward brother Lord Robert. What begins as a quarrel between siblings curdles into something far darker: a spectral reckoning that blurs the line between the living and the dead. Rives writes with a woman's keen eye for domestic detail turned sinister, making the castle's familiar corners feel haunted by old cruelties. The surrounding tales continue this tradition of old ghosts and older grievances, where love and loyalty warp into something more dangerous. For readers who crave their ghost stories with period texture and psychological weight, not jump scares.