The Gospel of Noah by A. Robles Review: The Devil Went Down to Georgia

A Southern witch novel that turns scripture inside out and gives the Devil the best lines.

The Gospel of Noah, Book One of the Summerland Series by A. Robles, lands from New Forest Press on 6 October, and it is a wild, bold slab of witchcraft horror. Noah is a young stage magician in a Georgia town where the woods glow red, the dead never stop talking, and the women in his family keep secrets the way other folk keep the good china. Two women from his mother’s committee have gone missing, and something in the trees knows his name. In this Gospel of Noah review I look at how Robles turns the Bible inside out, why the voice holds it all together, and why this is a book that earns its excess.

Robles has written a Black Gospel in the true sense: a Southern Gothic that turns scripture inside out and gives the Devil the best lines. It is loud, lurid and packed to the rafters on purpose, and a warm, filthy, funny voice holds every excess in place. The excess is the point

The Gospel of Noah Review: Scripture Turned Inside Out

Every family has a story it tells so it never has to tell the true one. The Aberthas say they found the secret of the Summerland peach. The Scott women say they just like to gather round an old well in spring and autumn, plant sunflowers, and bake bread for the poor. Both stories are lies. One is about money. The other is about the Devil.

That gap between the story and the truth is the ground A. Robles builds on. It is Noah’s inheritance, and it is the engine of the whole book.

Noah is twenty-one, drinks whiskey for breakfast, and is desperate to be seen. He works in the family herb shop, the Caduceus, with his aunt Morgan, who swears like a docker and loves like a guard dog. His mother, Melinda, is a Southern belle with a gin habit and a talent for not answering questions. His ex, Sam, still looks at him like a lost pup. And every year Noah auditions to perform at the Esbat, the grand old cabaret run by Gerald Wardwell, the silver-haired magician whose praise he wants more than air. Every year he fails.

Then the voices come back. So does the Man in Black, the thing with ember eyes that used to stand over his bed when he was a boy. Two women from Mama’s town committee go missing. The woods on the edge of town, the Bloodwood, which the first settlers called Sheol, start to hum.

That is the set-up, and I will keep the rest of the road dark. What matters is how Robles tells it.

Look at how the book opens. In its first two sentences, Noah recalls his mother’s warning never to answer the voices that call to you, and then tells us the voices say she is wrong. Look at the tense. The warning sits in the past, as a memory. The reply slides into the present.

The voices still speak. They speak now, as Noah tells us the story. In two short lines Robles tells you the ending of the argument before the book has begun: Mama lost. Noah answered. And the whole novel becomes a testimony, the kind of thing a convert writes after the fact. That is what a gospel is, after all. It is good news told by someone who was there.

It is also a lovely bit of Southern craft. Starting with what Mama always told you is how half the stories below the Mason-Dixon line begin. Robles takes that folksy frame and puts a knife in it.

How The Gospel of Noah Rewrites the Bible

The title is not a joke, or not only a joke. This is a gospel written from the other side of the altar, and Robles builds it out of the Bible’s own bones.

Take the night Noah first follows the Man in Black into the Bloodwood. There is a fire in a clearing. The flames burn white. Robles tells us the bush burns but is not eaten by the flame, and anyone raised on Sunday school will hear Exodus in it. Moses was told to take off his shoes, for the ground was holy. Noah gets a different order: strip bare and be as nature made him. The voice in the fire names itself the God of Tubal Cain and the Great Initiator. Then comes the serpent, and I will say only that the Garden of Eden gets turned on its head in the nastiest way imaginable.

It is a brilliant scene because it does two things at once. It is lurid body horror, pure and simple. And it is a close, careful piece of inversion. Every beat of the call of Moses is there, flipped.

The book does this again and again. The killer in town leaves Exodus 22:18 on the wall, the verse that says a witch shall not be suffered to live. The local bar is called Jacob’s Ladder, has nuns pouring the drinks, and serves a shot that sums up the whole novel’s cheek. It is called the Pentecost: absinthe, vodka, and Fireball to chase, a whole Holy Trinity knocked back in one gulp.

And that, as it happens, is the best way I can describe reading Robles. His prose is a Pentecost shot. Three spirits that should never share a glass: the Southern Gothic family saga, the occult thriller, and the queer coming-of-age story. It burns going down. It should not work. Then you start seeing angels.

There is craft under the heat, too. Midway through, Mama tells Noah a folk tale her own mother told her, about a lonely girl called Amouria, a Goddess who comes as a white doe, a fisherman, and the first sunflowers. It reads like a bedtime story. It is, in fact, the novel’s blueprint. Keep it in your pocket. You will need it at the end.

Robles is also very funny, which is the part the blurb will not tell you. Melinda and Morgan bicker like two cats in a sack, and every line lands. Mama swears by the Lord in ways the Lord would not enjoy. Morgan threatens storms of temper on anyone who so much as giggles in her shop. Mama sets the police chasing a red herring with nothing but a look and some Chinese silk curtains. The dialect is thick and it is warm, and it does something clever: it makes the family feel so ordinary, so gossipy and drunk and loving, that when the darkness in them shows, it lands twice as hard.

That darkness is the book’s big theme. Noah’s father’s peach fortune rests on slavery, and later on something whiter and more powdery. Noah knows it. He tells us every fruit in that orchard grows out of blood, and he could be talking about any family in the book. The Scotts, the Wardwells, the Aberthas: each line is built on a pact made long ago, and each child pays for it. Robles is asking what we owe for the deals our parents made before we were born. His answer is not comforting.

Then there is Noah himself. He is queer in a town that jeers at him, and the book makes the point quietly but firmly: in this world, men almost never inherit the Gift. Noah is marked twice over. He wants to be seen so badly that he will take the eyes of the Devil if no one else is looking. Robles never makes that a lecture. It is simply true of the boy, and it makes his fall easy to understand, and hard to judge.

A word on excess, because some readers will balk. This is a book with a lot of weed, a lot of whiskey, a lot of blood, and at least one sex scene that will make even seasoned horror hands blink. It is also a book with a great deal of lore: Madonnas and Magicians, Judges with a brand on the wrist, Hidden Children in the trees, a prophecy in rhyme. The greenhouse chapters, where Mama explains the family faith, lean hard on talk. And this galley, being uncorrected, still has the odd typo and a few similes that reach for the rafters and knock over a candle.

None of that dents it much. The excess is the point. This is a gospel of appetite. It is about a boy who has been told all his life to want less, and who finally decides to want everything. A tidy book could not carry that. A novel this drunk on its own power can.

Is The Gospel of Noah Scary?

Yes, though perhaps not in the way you expect.

The early chapters are pure dread. The scene in the bathroom, where Noah feels something standing behind him and knows it will not leave until he looks in the mirror, is a small masterclass in the rule that the thing you refuse to see is the thing that owns you. The murders, when they come, are shown in full and are as cruel as anything in recent folk horror.

But the deeper fear is quieter. It is the fear of being wanted by the dark, and of wanting it back. Noah is not running from the Man in Black for long. He is running toward him. The horror is how good it feels.

Robles, whose author note describes him as a Gardnerian High Priest and a practitioner of Lucumí, writes witchcraft like someone who knows its texture. The rites have weight. The vocabulary will ring bells for anyone who has read Charles Leland’s Aradia, the old “Gospel of the Witches”, which this book answers in a far darker key. It sits on the shelf beside Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, with its cursed Southern dynasty, and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, with its mother, its Devil and its terrible bargain. And if you loved the naked flight into the woods at the end of Robert Eggers’s The Witch, this is that film’s ending stretched to three hundred pages and set in Georgia.

It also belongs with the new wave of witch fiction that cares about who gets burned. Grady Hendrix went looking for the working-class roots of folk magic in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Cynthia Gómez gave a queer Latine witch the keys to a rotten dynasty in Muñeca. Robles joins them with a queer Afro-Latino voice and a much wilder, much bloodier kind of faith.

This book has had a life before now. It first appeared in 2020, self-published under the name Tony Sosa as Summerland: The Gospel of Noah, with the subtitle The Black Gospel, and was followed by The Gospel of Levi and The Gospel of Abel. Now it returns as The Gospel of Noah by A. Robles, with illustrations by Carlos Ranna, from New Forest Press, an imprint of Crossed Crow Books. That old subtitle still fits. A small press relaunch of an indie series is a vote of confidence, and on this showing it is well placed.

The last act goes big. Then it goes bigger. Robles has promised a war, and the ending opens the door to it rather than closing any. It should leave readers hungry for the next gospel.

Most novels about the Devil want you to resist him. This one pours you a Pentecost and dares you to say no.

The Verdict: Is The Gospel of Noah Worth Reading?

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