Greetings,
Thanks for visiting our Website. Yes, Kameron Gray is a pseudonym. My burning desire to write fiction became a reality when House of Blood and Fire was published. I wrote two, non-fiction books in the 1990s which were published under my real name.
Growing up near the Mississippi River piqued my interest in The Cottage. The once-proud Greek Revival mansion sat in ruins, among weeds and towering water oaks just a few miles south of the LSU campus on River Road. Draped in Spanish moss, the trees looked like bearded, Celtic warriors, standing guard over the now deserted grounds. Having raised four children in a 200-year-old Greek Revival cottage, I began to wonder what life must’ve been like in the great house’s heyday.
My curiosity got the best of me and I began researching the history of the place. I first read about the Conrads and Duncans—two families descended from George and Martha Washington—who had resettled in Louisiana from the East coast. The plantation was given to Frederick and Frances Conrad as a wedding present, from her father, prominent New Orleans attorney Abner Duncan. Then I learned of the heroics of two slaves, Mordecai and Ebenezer, who braved the cold waters of the Mississippi River one February night in 1859, to save dozens of victims of a paddle wheeler that had exploded off Conrad’s Bend. Further digging led me to write about the old place’s resurrection after the Civil War—and its haunting.
I attended the national Book Expo America in New York City from May 29 to June 2. House of Blood and Fire was among the featured “new releases,” having garnered the “Publisher’s Choice” award. I’m currently discussing the possibility of a screenplay with an executive, who’s also the former state film commissioner here in Louisiana.
My literary agent in New York is working on the proposal for my trilogy, Babel. The first installment, The Absinthe House, is set in pre-Katrina New Orleans. It involves a Russian-based religious cult called the Castratis (the infamous Rasputin was a Castrati), a de-frocked federal judge, and a prominent lawyer determined to clear his name. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new work!