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What the Levee Keeps

Name: What the Levee Keeps
Price: 8.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.8 (4 reviews)
Author: S. L. Marchand

by S. L. Marchand · published via Smithbook

A levee inspector walks the Mississippi at night. Something under the grass is walking with him.

★★★★★ 4.8 · 4 reviews 76 readers English

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★★★★★

"No gore at all, and it is the scariest thing I have read in years. The sound design of this book, if a book can have that."

ros•••@readers.staging.smithbook.test · verified reader

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What it covers

Southern gothicNew Orleanshaunted riverslow dread

About this book

Every spring the Corps of Engineers sends Remy Guidry to walk forty miles of levee below New Orleans and write down what he finds: sand boils, soft spots, crawfish holes. This spring he finds a boot in the grass, still laced, pointing up the slope. Then he finds another, a mile on, pointing the same way. Then he starts hearing footsteps on the river side, where there is nothing but water. A slow, cold Southern gothic about what a river takes and what the levee is built to hold back.

Look inside · First chapter

Remy Guidry started walking at dusk, the way the old inspectors had taught him, because sand boils were easier to see when the light went flat and the water on the land side stopped reflecting sky. He carried a flashlight, a clipboard in a plastic bag and a can of orange paint for marking soft ground. The river was high for April, brown and quick, and it made a sound against the batture like somebody breathing through their teeth. At mile marker nineteen he found a boot in the grass. It was a wh

Keep reading. Read the first chapter free →

Product details

Title: What the Levee Keeps
Author: S. L. Marchand
Format: Digital · browser reader
Language: English
Category: Horror & Suspense
Delivery: In seconds · to your e-mail
Access: Lifetime · any device
Publisher: Independent · via Smithbook

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Reviews

4.8

★★★★★

4 reviews

5★3

4★1

3★0

2★0

1★0

★★★★★ · ros•••@readers.staging.smithbook.test9/30/2026

Quiet and terrifying

No gore at all, and it is the scariest thing I have read in years. The sound design of this book, if a book can have that.

★★★★☆ · cur•••@readers.staging.smithbook.test9/30/2026

Real Louisiana

I grew up in Chalmette and he gets the levee exactly right. The ending went somewhere I did not expect.

★★★★★ · ann•••@readers.staging.smithbook.test9/29/2026

Read it in one night

Bad idea. Great book. Remy is such a decent, tired man, and I wanted him to get home so badly.

★★★★★ · vic•••@readers.staging.smithbook.test9/29/2026

Slept with the lamp on

He warned us. I did not listen. The boots in the grass will stay with me for a while.

About the author

S. L. Marchand

I spent thirty years in the engine rooms of Mississippi riverboats, mostly at night, mostly alone with a lot of machinery that knocked when it wanted attention. You learn to listen down there. You learn that a river has moods and a boat has opinions. I retired to a shotgun house in the Bywater with a porch, a fig tree and a neighbor who tells me every ghost story she has ever heard, twice. My books are not about blood. They are about the sound in the wall that stops when you stand up, and the streetcar that comes by one stop too many. I write at the kitchen table after midnight, which my wife says is the problem.

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