The Hidden Gods of Appalachia (HB)

After the death of her mother and the disappearance of her younger brother, a grief-scarred woman, Charlie, escapes her small Appalachian town for Oregon—only to be drawn back a decade later by the death of a distant aunt. What awaits her upon her return is far worse than grief and repressed memories. Home is nearly unrecognizable. Sprawling development has carved the land that raised her into a cold, soulless dot on the map, filled with tension and unease. She quickly discovers that several locals have recently vanished into the dense forests around the town. Their bodies are being found miles away, mutilated and barely identifiable. Strange sigils are being found carved around the scenes of the disappearances; symbols eerily similar to the ones Charlie remembers from her own tragic childhood. Charlie is soon drawn into the orbit of Warren, a private detective with a dangerous magnetism, who believes she may be the only one capable of stopping what’s coming for them all. As buried truths claw their way to the surface, she must decide how much of herself she’s willing to sacrifice to break a dark cycle that has already taken everything from her years before.

THE HIDDEN GODS OF APPALACHIA blends the haunting and disturbing complex family dynamics of Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior, the intimate and unsettling folk-horror atmosphere and creeping sense of dread of T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones, and Brom’s Slewfoot, and the intense romance and emotional chemistry of Harley LaRoux’s Her Soul to Take, while maintaining a strange, atmospheric horror that is rooted in regional Appalachian lore.