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December, Rural Alabama.
Every Christmas Eve, twelve-year-old Mags sneaks into her grandaddy’s stable and sleeps among the horses, hoping – just once – to hear them talk. This year, instead, she stumbles onto something far more dangerous: a wounded white stag hidden in the woods.
The forest isn’t normal. Animals talk back. Witches lurk under curtains of kudzu. There’s a secret cave no one’s supposed to find, a single golden bullet that changes everything and an island you can only reach through a portal. Closing in on all of it is a relentless deer hunter: Tasty Murder.
As the days blur toward New Year’s, Mags is pulled into a fast, strange and risky chase through the woods, where magic and real danger exist side by side. Led to a midnight showdown on three-wheel ATVs, her survival depends on quick thinking, nerve and knowing who – or what – to trust.
"White Hart is a wonder. It's impossible not to be swept away and amazed." — Samantha Hunt, author of Mr. Splitfoot
"This is the South you’ve always wanted to see on the page—lyrical, strange, funny, and haunting. The line between fantasy and reality is beautifully blurred: in this world, the inside of a barn is just as magical as a talking stag. It blew me away.” — Gin Phillips, author of Fierce Kingdom
"A Southern Gothic E.T., with a talking white stag standing in for Elliot's alien, deer hunters instead of federal agents, and a climactic Quadzilla chase every bit as thrilling as that flying bike scene. A new holiday classic. Short enough to kill in a snow day, but so rich and full, it'll haunt you forever." — Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters
“Exuberant, packed with surprise, and a contagious love of language, Alex Dawson's Welcome to White Hart reads like a work of wizardry!” — Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
"At one point in this thrilling, heartfelt book, a character remarks on the handwriting of her grandmother, how the ruled paper could not contain her wild words, and that's how I felt reading Alex Dawson's Welcome to White Hart, a kind of amazement that the bound material could contain the strangeness on display. In a perfect world, this would be the story we told our loved ones at Christmas." — Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here
"The Last Unicorn by way of Harry Crews. If Peter Beagle had fallen into a pig-scalding tank on a Bacon County tenant farm, he might have written Welcome to White Hart. A truly original, one-of-a-kind, Rough South fable. I loved it, and I can't wait to see what Dawson writes next!" — Jason Rekulak, author of Hidden Pictures
"Just as this tale’s interdimensional white stag jumps the border between the woods of Alabama and a land of high enchantment, Dawson deftly leaps over genre boundaries, mixing Southern Gothic with fantasy and mythic lore. Welcome to White Hart is a bold, narrative brew; a wild, new spell that will dazzle you." — Julia Liz Elliot, author of The New & Improved Romie Futch