Dark and Shallow Lies

Every small town has its own gravitational pull, a force made of shared histories, unspoken rules, and the ghosts of those who left—or never could. This pull is strongest in the places that feel cut off from the rest of the world, where the land itself seems to hold its breath. In such a place, a person’s disappearance is a tear in the town’s very fabric, a disruption to the delicate ecosystem of secrets and loyalties that keeps everything in balance. When a best friend vanishes into the humid, myth-soaked air, the silence left behind is deafening, filled with the buzzing of cicadas and the whispers of what everyone knows but no one will say. The search for truth becomes a treacherous journey through the tangled relationships and half-truths of the people you thought you knew best.

This atmosphere of secrets and deep-rooted folklore is the air Ginny Myers Sain has breathed her whole life. Growing up in a small, rural town, she was fascinated by the way landscape and legend intertwine, shaping the people who live there. She noticed how a place’s history—both the celebrated stories and the buried ones—can feel like a living entity, a character in its own right. Sain, who has spent her career creating stories for the stage as a theatre director, wanted to capture that feeling of a place being both a home and a potential threat. "Dark and Shallow Lies" emerged from her desire to explore how a town’s collective memory and its darkest secrets can swallow a person whole, and how the search for a lost friend can force you to confront the haunting truths of your own home.

Module 1: The Psychic Capital of the World

The story is set in La Cachette, Louisiana. The name literally means "The Hiding Place." It’s the self-proclaimed "Psychic Capital of the World," a town so isolated you can only reach it by boat. This physical separation creates a unique cultural bubble. Here, psychic abilities are a fundamental part of identity and the local economy.

One of the first things we learn is that supernatural abilities are a normalized part of daily life. Characters have specific gifts. Evie is clairaudient, meaning she hears messages from spirits. Hart is a psychic empath, feeling the emotions of others as if they were his own. Honey, the protagonist's guardian, is a medium who communicates with the dead. This is presented as a simple, albeit sometimes burdensome, reality. The town even markets these abilities to tourists, selling everything from good-luck charms called gris-gris to conversations with dead pets. This creates a fascinating tension between genuine spiritual practice and commercial performance.

This leads to a core dynamic of the book: the line between reality and superstition is deliberately blurred. The community's beliefs are shaped by local folklore. Legends of the rougarou, a Cajun werewolf, are used to explain unexplained events. Stories of the fifolet, ghostly lights that lead people astray in the swamp, are part of childhood lore. This blend of myth and reality makes it difficult for both the characters and the reader to distinguish between a genuine premonition and a simple fear. When a character has a "death warning," is it a psychic vision or just anxiety? In La Cachette, it could be both.

And here’s the thing. This isolation fosters a powerful, insular community. A unique generational bond, known as the "Summer Children," defines the core relationships. This group of ten kids, including our protagonist Grey and her missing best friend Elora, were all born in the same year. They are described as "a complete set," their connection viewed as something special, almost fated. This shared history makes them more like a single organism than a group of individuals. When one of them is lost, the entire group feels the wound. Their collective identity is scarred by past tragedies, like the unsolved disappearance of two of their members years ago, and now, by Elora’s vanishing. The loss is a fracture in their shared soul.