The Backwoods

Hollis Varn returns to Fenwell Hollow expecting paperwork, property, maybe a quiet inheritance. What he steps into is something older: Tallow House, a house that listens. A stitched ledger called the Roll, buried memories that don’t belong wholly to the past, and an orchard that catalogs names like fruit.

A taut, lyrical folk-horror about buried bargains and the price of memory. When Maren digs up a weathered crate stamped H.V. in her family’s orchard, she releases an old ledger and a lullaby that lodges in Moonreach’s dreams. As bargains traded in seed and silence begin to ripple through the town—barns whispering, neighbors eyeing one another, crates that demand repayment—Maren must defend her newborn’s laugh from a landscape that remembers debts and collects in blood.

In Boneway, the third book of The Backwoods Series, the shadows of Fenwell Hollow deepen as progress cuts a line through old ground. What should have been a path forward becomes a reckoning: names surface where they do not belong, memories refuse to stay buried, and bargains echo louder than ever. Blending Southern Gothic atmosphere with supernatural suspense, Boneway invites listeners into a world where every mile is haunted by history, and every step risks debt to forces older than law.

They keep ledgers because memory can be counted. The river keeps ledgers because it prefers the arithmetic of things that are wet.

Tommis was born a backwoods boy with gasoline on his hands and trouble in his grin. Lila was the girl who collected secrets in notebooks, aching to escape the small-town talk that caged her. Together, they refused the rules of the Southern Bible Belt—refused fear, refused silence, refused to live a life written by someone else.