About the Story
Dr. Julian Stoner left Boaz, Alabama, and left belief behind.
Now a Nashville psychiatrist known for writing about fear, faith, and inherited religion, he has spent years helping others untangle the convictions that once governed his own mind.
Then a call from Branchwater Assisted Living brings him home: his aunt Ruth has died, and she has left papers for him—personally.
Back in Boaz, Julian finds a town shaped by prayer, grief, and old certainties, still quick to wrap suffering in religious language. As he follows the questions Ruth left behind, he is drawn into the lives of a grieving family, a community gathering around tragedy, and the stubborn power of beliefs that do not release people simply because they have stopped believing them.
The Boaz Superstition is a Southern novel about memory, fear, inherited faith, and what it costs to tell the truth in a town that prefers older answers.
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Beneath the Story
The Boaz Superstition is a novel about belief and doubt, inherited certainty, evidence, conscience, and the personal cost of asking whether something widely accepted is actually true.
It asks:
- How much of what we believe was chosen—and how much was simply inherited?
- What happens when evidence begins to conflict with beliefs tied to family, identity, and community?
- Why can questioning an idea feel like questioning the people who taught it to us?
- How much certainty do we need before calling something true?
- What responsibility do we have to examine beliefs that shape the way we live and judge others?
- What can doubt cost when belonging depends on certainty?
Julian’s struggle is not simply about religion. It is about the difficulty of examining any belief that has become part of who we are—and deciding what conscience requires when truth and belonging begin pulling in different directions.
About the Novel
Genre: Psychological / Southern Fiction
Setting: Boaz, Alabama
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Publication: 2026 — Paperback and Kindle editions
From Richard
The Boaz Superstition grows out of questions I have lived with for years: how beliefs are inherited, why certainty can become part of identity, and what happens when a person begins examining ideas that a family or community has long treated as settled.
Julian Stoner gives me a way to explore those questions through fiction rather than argument. He understands religion from the inside, but he also understands how the mind protects what it has been taught to trust.
The novel is not about proving one side right and another wrong. It is about what questioning can cost, how difficult it can be to reconsider inherited beliefs, and what happens when doubt enters relationships built around certainty.
Read The Boaz Superstition
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