Image via Regal House Publishing
John Fleming may have written Wonders of Shadow Key for a YA audience, but this MA (middle-age) reader couldn’t put it down.
The book has it all. Hurricanes. Vintage Florida motels. Ghosts. Pirates. Seashells.
If the world didn’t appear to be ending throughout — at least, the world as we subtropical coastal dwellers know it — it would be a whimsical, light read. As it stands, though, it’s a dystopian yet hopeful whimsical light read.
Imagine being a young girl whose life has really only known hurricanes like we’ve seen the past seven years. Now imagine your mom and dad decide to take a vacation to a key where they get a great deal… because everyone else has left for drier ground.
Everyone but the ghosts who roam the hotel and waters surrounding it, that is.
And that’s the gist of Wonders of Shadow Key. It’s delightful and sobering all at once, and worth every minute.
Written by John Fleming, a USF professor specializing in creative writing and fiction, this is the kind of book that makes you want to enroll in one of his classes so you can learn his secrets. His literary bestiary, Fearsome Creatures of Florida, explored real and imagined Florida cryptids.
Here’s an excerpt from Wonders of Shadow Key:
Over the causeway, we turn right at Shadow Key’s one and only stop sign. The road near the beach is a mess. Besides dead fish and dead leaves, there are piles of seaweed (also dead) and old garbage cans (never alive). Seagulls fight over scraps of trash, roofing up their wings like vultures.
The best you can say about the buildings is that they’re still standing. The condos to our left have seen better days. The ones to our right have seen better centuries.
Of course we turn right.
It’s almost dusk. The taller condos cast creepy shadows over our building as we pull into the parking lot. Our place is an old two-story hotel converted into condos. It’s supposed to be called Shadow Key Inn, but the sign next to the pool reads “SHA KEY I” because the other letters were blasted off in the storms.
And that so called “pool area”? The one with the rust showing through the white fence like blood through a bandage? The one with leaves and tipped-over chairs littering the deck like a Monopoly game after some sore loser kicked the board? The one with unknown things poking up out of the gray water like zombies rising from the unholy dead?
Yeah…
I swear something moved in there. A flash of slithery green, a.k.a. a living nightmare.
“Did you just see that?” I ask.
But of course my parents never see anything they don’t want to see.
Wonders of Shadow Key publishes Mar. 31, 2026.
Love reading? The Gabber Newspaper has a monthly book club!
The book club focuses on Florida voices and stories, with special attention paid to historically marginalized voices. The club is free. It meets the second Wednesday of the month at Habana Café. Book discussion starts at 7 p.m. but members often arrive at 6:30 p.m. to order food and drinks. The book club meets every month except December. Find the schedule here.
