First Look: Home of the Happy's Cover
Coming April 1, 2025
After seven years, hundreds of hours of interviews, even more hours spent reading newspapers and court documents, almost 200,000 words written, 70,000 whittled out, and three rounds of edits—my debut finally has a face. As I dot “i”s and cross “t”s for final copyedits and draft my acknowledgments, I’m thrilled to share the official cover for Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie.
“A riveting blend of true crime and memoir tracing the author’s investigation into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather in 1980s Louisiana and the reverberations on her family and community throughout the decades, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most mystical and overlooked landscapes—the Cajun prairie.
On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s rice field and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker.
Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather’s murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at Angola Prison serving a life sentence. They’ll say, in so many words: “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.”
For readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg's The Third Rainbow Girl, Home of the Happy unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crime—and investigates the mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the author’s great-grandfather?”
Song credit: “Dans le pins” by Michot’s Melody Makers.
The cover of Home of the Happy was designed by HarperCollins Art Director Ploy Siripant—who gracefully managed my nitpicky notes of “it needs to look more like Louisiana” and “idk I want it to be more blue?” to create this stunning tableau. You may know Siripant’s work from major titles including: Samantha Power’s Pulitzer-winning memoir The Education of an Idealist, Gabrielle Union’s You Got Anything Stronger?, Faith Jones’s Sex Cult Nun, Matt Bell’s Appleseed, and James Han Mattson’s Reprieve. See more of her work at ploysiripant.com.
The cover image itself is one of many hauntingly gorgeous photographs of Louisiana’s swamps and bayous taken by artist and photographer Olivia Perillo—whose visual renderings of Acadiana’s legacy, lore, and beauty captures something of its soul that I’ve tried, desperately and less effectively, to convey through language.
In the past, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with her on other Evangeline Parish projects, including these favorites:
The Holiday Lounge: On the Mamou Prairie, a portal to parties past
Stories from the Hidden Cemetery: In Point Blue’s pauper’s graveyard, little legends live on
See more of Olivia’s work at oliviaperillo.com and honestartproductions.com, and give her a follow on Instagram at @olivialight.
You can now pre-order the book at the major retailers listed below, or you can reach out to your favorite indie bookstore and order through them (highly encouraged).
And hold onto your proof of purchase—we’ve got something special in store for early pre-orders!
Just preordered!
Can hardly wait!!
cannot wait- preordered!!!!!!!!