Something has come down out of the high country.
It starts with missing calves and strange screams echoing along the river cliffs. Then a body is found hanging high in a tree, and the valley begins remembering old stories people stopped telling out loud years ago.
Some call it a mountain lion. Others whisper older names.
Gabriel Miller and the Kin know better than to rush toward fear with answers already in hand. In the Appalachian mountains, survival often depends less on understanding what's in the woods than understanding how people react once they believe something is there.
As panic spreads through the valley, the Kin work quietly to keep the situation from becoming something worse. But the deeper they look, the clearer it becomes that the creature stalking the ridges may not be the true danger at all.
Set in the mountains of western North Carolina, Cattywampus is a slow-burn Appalachian folk horror novella about pressure, fear, community, and the uneasy realization that some things are not invading the mountains.
Some things belong to them.