“Postcards of Seagrove” By Garrett Horn
Seagrove is a small beach town located in Northwest Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. Seagrove is also a state of mind. “Postcards of Seagrove” might best be described as a somewhat autographical, semi-fictitious history, but without a cohesive narrative. Hence the notion that these are “postcards.”
It is an attempt to capture the spirit of beach living, in and around Seagrove, Grayton and Seaside in the early days, roughly the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, but venturing into the near present. It is a combination of short vignettes, mostly two or three pages long, describing bits of the lifestyle of a young man during this time period, and it tries to tiptoe between true history and the surrealistic thoughts of our young man, sometimes blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Although most of these postcards are settled in the warm, fuzzy decades of the past, some of them are settled only in the author’s mind, perhaps, also, warm and fuzzy. “Postcards of Seagrove” is available at Sundog Books in Seaside for $16.
About the Author:
As the son of an U.S. Air Force officer, Garrett Horn travelled extensively as a boy. However, no matter where he ventured in his younger years, his heart was always in Seagrove. His father found the perfect lakefront cabin in 1959 on Eastern Lake, and this place has always been home ever since. He fell into home construction after college and it seemed to suit him. The feeling of accomplishment when you build something with your hands is a recurring theme in much of his writings. In 1982, he had the good fortune to help build some of the earliest houses in the Rosewalk of Seaside. This chance twist of fate led him to become a creative building contractor in South Walton, and also offered lots of inspiration to write about the experiences he saw in the adventure of building a new town.
Somewhere, in the years that have transpired since those formative years, at the beginnings of Seaside, the author has gained maturity, along with marriage, grown children, and even grandchildren. He still lives in Seagrove with his wife, Nina, on the lakeside property that his father first discovered in 1959.
“Sex on the Beach: Scandal in the Handle” By Mark Brady
The novel begins when Buck Moore, a Tallahassee attorney, has to go to the beaches of the Florida panhandle to defend a young pastor caught in a sex scandal. This places Buck in the middle of a personal predicament: how to keep from getting sand in his crotch and seaweed in his truck. Eventually, Buck connects with Bonnie Birch, the wife of the Iranian operator of the Dunes of Darius where Buck is staying, and a romance ensues. Buck also engages with a number of colorful local characters, such as Bo Hutchens, a county commissioner who has to flee for building illegal sea walls, but not because his landfill leaks arsenic into the Bay.
The chief antagonist, Dixie Don, is the head pastor at the Tabernacle of the Disciples of the Second Coming and Sepulcher of our Risen Lord. He is also a shady real estate developer who wants to maintain the secrecy of his new development, and to do that he must find out why the FBI was snooping around “his land.” To find out, he would like to enlist the aid of his uncle the sheriff, but Bubba is pre-occupied in his garage opening the freezer and looking at his former secretary who, despite some freezer burn, always “looks as pretty as the day he shot her.”
“Sex on the Beach: Scandal in the Handle” is available for $14.95 at Sundog Books in Seaside.
About the author:
Living in Seagrove Beach for the past 13 years, Brady has been active in the community, and was a disk jockey at the Seaside Neighborhood School radio station.
“I absorb the nature of the culture, the characters, and the schemes they get up to,” he says. “Indeed, I became absorbed to the point of feeling compelled to write about this region of Florida.”
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