the Thing That Howls in Hills: A Blackroot Ridge Cryptid Horror Novel

When a mutilated body is found on a rain-soaked road beneath Blackroot Ridge, Sheriff Mara Holt knows immediately that no ordinary animal made the kill.The wounds are impossible. The tracks are too large. And somewhere high in the hills, something begins to howl.Then the dead start howling too.Blackroot County has spent generations burying its darkest secrets beneath churches, cemeteries, family land, and carefully forgotten history. Long ago, powerful families made bargains with something living beneath the ridge-feeding it blood in exchange for survival. Now those bargains are coming due.The creatures descending from the hills are enormous, antlered nightmares capable of mimicking the voices of the dead. They heal from gunfire. They breed inside their victims. And the deeper Mara investigates, the more horrifying the truth becomes: the monsters stalking Blackroot County are only part of something much older buried beneath the mountain.With her deputies dying, ancient graves opening, children in danger, and an entire county surrounded by howls, Mara must uncover who fed Blackroot, who benefited from the sacrifices, and how to end a debt that has been passed from generation to generation.Because Blackroot remembers every name.And it intends to collect.The Thing That Howls in the Hills is a brutal cryptid-horror novel packed with creature attacks, Appalachian-style rural folklore, supernatural terror, body horror, graphic violence, buried family secrets, and a relentless fight against something that should never have been fed.