Not all hunters walk out of the Hunting Ground.
For generations, the swamps outside Chatawa, Mississippi have been feeding stories to the dark-Choctaw hunting parties that never came home, Civil War deserters erased without a trace, bootleggers and fishermen swallowed whole. The locals call it Shampe. The elders call it a warning. The missing posters on the gas station wall call it proof.
Bruce McMasterson doesn't believe in warnings.
A world-famous big-game hunter with a wall full of trophies and a heart gone numb, Bruce comes to Chatawa chasing a viral video of something huge moving between the cypress trees. To him, it's simple: one more record kill, one more monster mounted, one more legend with his name on it.
But Chatawa isn't a safari stop. It's Chatawa-"the hunting ground."
The sheriff won't joke about the swamp.
The preacher calls it a judgment.
The Choctaw elder says the thing out there doesn't just eat bodies. It eats pride.
As Bruce pushes deeper into the mire-setting traps, mocking old stories, ignoring every red flag-the lines between hunter and hunted start to rot. The swamp watches. The ledger of the missing grows. And Shampe, whatever it is, does what it has always done:
It remembers.
It waits.
It chooses.
SHAMPE is a brutal, atmospheric Southern Gothic horror novel about arrogance, old wounds in the Deep South, and what happens when a man who thinks he owns death walks into a place that keeps score. No one leaves the Hunting Ground unchanged-if they leave at all.