Following the Forgotten Trail Home
In the isolated mountain town of Harrows Glen, hikers disappear and searches end too quickly. Investigative journalist Maya Reeves knows all about investigations that get abandoned. When she arrives to find missing hiker Colin Westfield, she discovers something far darker than a simple disappearance.
The town of 243 souls welcomes Maya with unsettling hospitality and carefully guarded secrets. The locals speak in half-truths about the old ways and the woods that surround them. As Maya investigates, she uncovers evidence of other vanished hikers spanning generations, all following the same forgotten trail into the mountains. Each disappearance coincides with dates marked in old ledgers, offerings recorded in faded ink, a covenant maintained through blood and silence.
Something ancient dwells in those woods. Something that watches. Something that hunts. And it has been watching Maya since the moment she arrived.
The townsfolk aren't just complicit in the disappearances, they're orchestrators, feeding an entity that predates their settlement. When Maya finds Colin alive but irrevocably changed, she realizes the truth is worse than death. The missing don't just vanish. They're transformed. They become part of something that should have remained buried in Appalachian folklore.
Now Maya must choose between exposing Harrows Glen to the world or joining the others who walked the forgotten trail and never came back. Her search for answers has made her the next offering. In a town where everyone participates in the ritual, there's nowhere to run. And in these mountains, the old gods are very much alive.
Perfect for fans of dark atmospheric horror and folk terror, Following the Forgotten Trail Home delivers relentless tension and creeping dread that will haunt you long after the final page.
--- Sample Reading Extract ---
The road into Harrows Glen did not appear on any mapping app Maya tried. She found it the old way, following hand-painted signs that someone had nailed to the oak trees at irregular intervals, each one reading HARROWS GLEN in faded red letters that, in the fading afternoon light, looked uncomfortably like dried blood.
She had driven four hours from Richmond, the interstate giving way to highway, highway surrendering to state road, state road dwindling to this single lane of cracked asphalt threading between walls of ancient forest. The trees here were wrong somehow. Too tall, too dense, their canopies locking overhead so that even the late-summer sun arrived filtered and grey, like light through dirty glass.
Maya pulled her recorder from the cupholder and pressed record.
"Day one. Harrows Glen, population two hundred and forty-three, according to the last census anyone bothered to take. Colin Westfield, twenty-nine, went missing from the Appalachian Trail connector seven weeks ago. Local search and rescue called off after four days." She paused. "Four days. A twenty-nine-year-old experienced hiker, and they stopped looking after four days."
She clicked the recorder off as the tree line broke and the town appeared below her like something remembered from a dream she hadn't known she'd had.
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