The Bottom Remembers

By Michael Roy

In 1964, the state painted a number on every door in Crawfish Bottom. That spring, something else came to check the count.

Oral historian Dee Mayhew comes home to Frankfort, Kentucky, to bury her grandmother, and inherits a box of tapes. On them, the voices of a neighborhood the city bulldozed sixty years ago tell the story of the Tallyman, a tall figure in a rain slicker who walks when the river rises. He knocks three times and asks one question: How many live here?

Now the Kentucky River is climbing toward flood stage. Fog shaped like shotgun houses gathers over the old ground. And red numbers that never dry are appearing on doors again.

To stop him, Dee must finish what her grandmother started and give four hundred forgotten families back their names before the river crests on Halloween night.

Some debts are paid in blood. Some are paid in memory.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HNN3C9BS
• ISBN13: 9798163032730
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"