Books

They cut down the Confession Tree. They should have left it standing.

For generations, people came to the old oak at the crossroads to confess the things they could no longer live with. Murder. Betrayal. Secrets buried so deep that even their families never knew.

The tree listened. And it kept every word.

Now the oak is gone, its trunk cut into...

On the morning of February 25, 1884, a strip of Chatham County, North Carolina, woke to red on the ground. Flesh and blood had fallen out of a clear sky onto a farm wife’s yard. The newspapers laughed. The preachers prayed.

Dr. Edwin Latham has steady hands and a habit of looking closer than he should. He takes a scrap of the stuff to his...

THE PALE QUIET OF CEDAR CREEK

Second Edition

When the lights die... they rise.

At 3:33 a.m., Cedar Creek goes dark.

Sheriff Cass Holt is alone on rain-soaked Pineback Ridge when her truck dies inches from a four-hundred-foot drop. Fog swallows the road. The temperature plunges. Then something impossibly tall and bone-pale appears beyond her...

Beneath North Carolina’s Brown Mountain, something ancient has opened.

When researcher Willa Carrick detects an impossible signal beneath a remote ridge, she expects faulty equipment. Then wildlife begins moving along a path no map can explain. Roads split. Clocks disagree. People step into familiar places and emerge somewhere else, if they...

The tree is gone.

Its confessions are not.

For generations, people came to the Confession Tree carrying the things they could never tell another living soul. They believed the tree would take their guilt.

They never understood what it was taking with it.

Now the Darkwood Legacy reaches beyond the hollow.

A mirror holds something that refuses to...

Forty-three cursed objects were carved from the Confession Tree.

No one counted the scraps.

Cal Mercer sees nothing dangerous in the oak piled behind Malcolm Cross’s workshop. It is dry, seasoned, and perfect for a wet weekend at Pine Hollow Campground. When he finds families struggling to light their fires, Cal does what he has always done. He...

A year after Caleb Raines was buried, he knocks on his mother’s door.

He is cold, barefoot, and caked in cemetery mud. He calls Nora by a name only Caleb knew. He remembers the last morning she saw him alive.

Grief tells her to let him in.

At McGlendin Gap Cemetery, caretaker Elaine Carver has troubles of her own. Grass is dying in branching...

What happens when faith becomes a system more concerned with protecting itself than following Jesus?

The author has spent a lifetime inside the churches many people know well: Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Holiness, and more. He has seen sincere believers searching for God. He has also seen people judged, controlled,...

DRAGON — Second Edition

Completely rewritten, darker, and more terrifying, this is DRAGON as it was always meant to be.

Four teenagers slip through a fence surrounding an abandoned industrial complex for a night of drinking, music, and harmless trespassing. By morning, only one of them comes back out.

She is injured, terrified, and telling a story...

She went into the ground a woman and came back something the world doesn’t have a name for yet.

Grace Pritchard is home. Changed in ways her team can see but can’t measure, carrying a fire that isn’t hers alone anymore. Marcus is still writing everything down. Father Marsh is still asking the questions that don’t have clean answers. And the...

THE SHEPHERD

Father Eldon Marsh knows what evil looks like when it’s trying to hide.

He sealed something beneath a ridge in Watauga County, North Carolina thirty-eight years ago and drove away before sunrise. The county records showed an empty lot. The seal held. He didn’t go back.

Until now.

The lot isn’t empty anymore. There’s a church on the...

The Confession Tree doesn’t just take the guilty. It cultivates them. Reuben Carrow spent thirty years believing he was the keeper of the Confession Tree. He tended the land, walked the sinners to the ridge, and told himself the taking was part of the balance. The tree never corrected him. It had no reason to. Not yet.

Some debts don’t get called...

A Darkwood Legacy Lost Confessions Short Story

Three people have died in Heron Creek, North Carolina in three months. A volunteer firefighter walks into a controlled burn. An eight-year-old drowns in fourteen inches of water. A woman drives to an overlook at two in the morning and doesn’t come back. When investigator Mara Ellison arrives, she...

Walnut Ridge: Darkwood Legacy Book 9

On a farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, Grace Pritchard hasn’t slept through the night in months. The Oracle inside her doesn’t rest the way it used to. The garden at the center of her property, sixty feet of carefully tended soil with forty-three carved objects buried beneath it, is changing....

THE WOOD ALWAYS REMEMBERS

In 1811, Jonathan Pierce made a bargain with something older than the earth and meaner than anything rumored to be in the mountains for centuries, a Confession Tree rooted deep in the Appalachian dark. He fed it his wife. His sons. His soul. When he finally paid in full, the Tree filed him away in its wood, patient and...

Not everything that is worshipped is holy.

The prayers were answered. That was the point.
A barren woman conceived. A dying child recovered. A fisherman’s nets came up full. For eight months the faithful came to the ancient log dredged from the Chao Phraya River, and the ancient log gave them what they asked for.

Grace Pritchard arrives in...

The swamp was supposed to be the sanctuary.

It was for everyone who came before — the freedom seekers, the hunted, the desperate. Generations of the lost had vanished into the Great Dismal Swamp and lived. The water hid them. The roots held them. The dark kept them safe.

That was before it found the roots.

Grace Pritchard has faced what lives...

The road goes north. Something is already waiting.

Grace Pritchard comes out of an Oracle vision with a single word. North. No destination. No map. Just the pull — and the certainty that whatever is out there has been feeding for a very long time.

The trail they follow runs through the darkest chapter of American history. Seven carved pieces,...

Darkwood Legacy Book 5: JUBOKKO

In 1942, the United States government imprisoned 8,475 Japanese Americans in the Arkansas delta — on land nobody wanted, above something ancient that had been waiting for exactly this.

The entity beneath the Rohwer War Relocation Center had no name, no form, and no method until the internees arrived. Then the...

Some silences are warnings.

Mara Cole is a child welfare assessor — a woman trained to speak, to coax, to draw the truth out of frightened people. When she’s assigned to evaluate a remote Appalachian family who communicates only by chalkboard and refuses to make a sound, she assumes trauma. She assumes a cult. She assumes she’s seen worse.

She...