L.S. Stratton, better known as Shelly, has carved out a remarkable literary career spanning more than a dozen books across multiple genres. But the NAACP Image Award-nominated author’s latest work marks new territory. Her young adult debut, Sundown Girls, confronts one of America’s most overlooked historical horrors while centering Black girlhood, family dynamics and resilience. A former crime reporter turned literary powerhouse, Stratton brings her investigative eye and emotional depth to a story about 16-year-old Naomi, a kidnapping survivor reunited with her birth family who finds herself vacationing in a former sundown town with deadly secrets. The Maryland-based author, who lives with her husband, daughter and tuxedo cat, spoke about her creative process, the importance of authentic representation and why this story demanded to be told.
You were published at 19 from a first-time writer’s contest while in journalism school. How did your career as a crime reporter influence your fiction?
I was a crime reporter in a county in Maryland for about two and a half years. I covered everything from drug raids to Hells Angels to murder. It was a great experience that introduced me to the basics of crime writing, but the limits I had as a newspaper reporter, I could let those go when I did mystery and thrillers. When I’m a reporter, I have to be very factual and I’m not allowed to editorialize, but that is part of fiction writing, making things more vivid. In some ways that influenced me, but it was also an outlet in fiction writing for me to be able to do things I could never actually do as a reporter.
What made you decide this was the story you needed to tell right now?
Current events have definitely put history in perspective. I had always wanted to write a story about sundown towns, but I was never sure how to approach it. Sundown Girls actually started off as an adult novel told from the perspective of a woman who had gone through trauma in her childhood. But I realized the story was a lot more vivid in the past than it was in the present. The old adage is, if the story is happening mostly in flashbacks, that’s where your story is. I realized I had to write something from the perspective of a 16-year-old girl, and I was really intimidated because I had tried YA in the past and was told I didn’t really have the voice for it. But I was pulled by this story. This story knew what it wanted to be. I sent a few chapters to my agent and she responded in less than a week saying yes, yes, yes, keep going. I was able to crank out the novel in about four months.
How did you know you were on the right track?
As a writer, you know when it feels like the writing is an uphill task versus when it’s just pouring out of you. When it enters the pouring phase, you know you’re in a good place to keep going.
Give us a quick synopsis, what should we expect when we pick up Sundown Girls?
It’s a YA thriller slash horror told from the perspective of a girl named Naomi, though she also has another name, Cameron. Naomi was kidnapped when she was about 10 months old and raised by a woman who was very kind to her. She had no idea she had been kidnapped. She thought this was her mother and stayed with her until she was 15 years old, then the police found her. She’s reunited with her family who are just so happy to have her, but it’s not a smooth transition. Her therapist suggests the family go on a bonding vacation to a place that is different for all of them, so she doesn’t feel like the outsider. They decide to go to a cabin in Sparksburg, Virginia, for three weeks. Unfortunately, her parents didn’t do much research into the town. It turns out it was a former sundown town, and not only that, it’s also haunted. Naomi starts to pick up on stuff while she’s there. There’s this strange smell that she notices, like rotting, and no one else in the family smells it. She starts to see this mysterious girl outside her window at night. When she researches the town, she discovers it was a former sundown town, and then two girls go missing.
Why was it important for Naomi to be more than just a victim of circumstance?
I wanted to show that even in history, from slavery to Jim Crow to civil rights, even if people were going through persecution and atrocities, they had day-to-day lives. They fell in love, they had children, they went to proms, they went to church. In the story, Naomi has her first love, she’s excited because she’s dating. That was important to include because it’s not just tragedy. That is not the Black existence. Even though we’re dealing with a lot of things on the national stage, we have day-to-day lives. We still endure and we still have experiences. It’s more authentic to show both.
What does it mean to you to write softness as a strength?
My daughter is about 12, and she’s going to be 13 soon. Her and her friends are middle-class girls who’ve grown up with some level of privilege. They’re not hardened, they’re very sweet and funny and silly, but they’ve also been taught to be able to speak up for themselves. It’s important to reflect that balance, that you can be gentle and silly and funny but you can also be assertive when the time calls for it. I know girls that are like Naomi, and I grew up with girls like Naomi. There are the hardened girls, but there are a lot of girls who are very soft and gentle but will do what needs to be done when the time calls for it.
Did you feel pressure when tackling this project?
Absolutely. Contemporary events have definitely put things in perspective. One of the characters says in the novel, history keeps repeating itself, and I don’t understand why this keeps happening. It’s important to understand that the things happening in the present don’t exist in a vacuum. There were things that led up to it that have created the current situation. The only way to correctly address them and atone for them is to first acknowledge them, to say this did happen, what happened was wrong, and this is what we’re going to do to make sure it never happens again. In this novel, the town of Sparksburg is trying to rebrand itself as a tourist destination with cabins, but it never talks about its past. Naomi gets very annoyed and frustrated by that, and rightfully so. You can’t pretend like this didn’t happen. In this novel, it’s in the form of haunting, but in a metaphorical way, we are constantly haunted by the past atrocities and systems in this country.
If a Black girl who feels unseen picks up your novel, what do you hope she feels by the time she reads that last page?
I hope she feels inspired and doesn’t feel powerless. Even though circumstances seem incredibly overwhelming, this is not completely out of your control. Every little thing that you do in your life, in your place, in your town, in your school, you can have an impact. Please always keep that to heart.
Sundown Girls releases Jan. 27 at major retailers and local bookstores. Follow L.S. Stratton on Instagram at @shellystrattonbooks for updates on her next adult thriller, Good Morning Love, coming in 2027.
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