Deep in the gut of West Virginia there’s a place where families spread blankets and children chase each other through the grass. Pocahontas County locals have heard things for generations. Gunfire. Distant shouting. Something mournful bleeding out of the tree line at dusk when the light goes bad.

There’s a lookout tower in the park. Climb it and the whole world opens up. The Alleghenys roll on forever and the Greenbrier River Valley spreads out below like something God drew on a good day. It was here, on this ground, four and a half months after West Virginia was cut from Virginia’s side, that the Confederacy’s last breath in the new state rattled out and went still.

They call it the war of brothers and mostly that’s poetry, but here it was just true. These weren’t boys from Georgia or Carolina come up to die in the hills. These were Appalachian farmers and woodsmen fighting for hollows they knew by name, against men who knew the same creek bends and the same silences. The boys on both sides had hunted these ridges and knew exactly what they were losing.

They were teenagers, most of them. Expendable currency. Spent by old men on an idea.

When it was over, the dead went into shallow graves and the wounded went into the cold of November in the highlands. For years after, the earth kept giving the bodies back. Bones pushing up through the soil like the land couldn’t stomach what had been fed to it.

The winners wrote it the way winners always do. The last real witnesses, old growth trees that saw everything, got logged off. Gone. And then they built a park. Picnic tables. A playground.

A playground on top of all those boys.

Droop Mountain isn’t a ghost story. Droop Mountain haunts us with the truth about what war costs and about who pays, because we are just too happy to forget.

When the deadly Dogman tears into a group of campers, Cryptid Carl expects just another job and maybe a strange new specimen for his collection. Instead he discovers something far worse.

A sickness is spreading through the waterways of West by God, and Carl finds the same darkness seeping into his own mind. If he cannot stop it soon, the madness swallowing the forests will swallow him too.

With uneasy allies at his back and the ancient caves of Appalachia before him, Carl will have to dig deep to find the source of the madness... or lose himself to it forever.

If you love Robert R. McCammon and Christopher Buehlman, pick up this pulp adventure steeped in Appalachian folklore, haunted hollers, and backwoods monsters. Black Water is one ride you don’t want to miss.

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In 1887, two lumberjacks working along the Manistee River reported seeing something that did not fit into the natural order of the woods. They described a creature with the body of a man and the head of a dog. It stood upright, watching them, before retreating into the timber.

The account survives in fragments, passed down more through local retellings than formal documentation. The earliest pieces of Dogman lore come from working men, isolated places, and stories told just enough times to persist.

Half a century later, in 1937, a man named Robert Fortney claimed he was attacked outside Paris, Michigan by a pack of wild dogs. According to later accounts, one of the animals stood upright during the encounter and attempted to grab him with something described as grasping, almost human hands.

One of the most controversial elements in Dogman lore is the so-called Gable Film, allegedly shot in the 1970s near Luther, Michigan. The footage is said to depict a large, upright canine creature moving through dense brush. At one point, it pauses and looks directly toward the camera.

The film has never been publicly verified.

Some claim it was confiscated. Others argue it never existed at all. A persistent minority insist they have seen fragments of it, often describing the same sequence of movements and the same unsettling moment of eye contact.

Whether the film is real is almost secondary to what it represents. It marks the point where the Dogman shifts from regional folklore into something that feels closer to modern myth.

In 1987, Steve Cook, a radio DJ based in Cadillac, Michigan, recorded a novelty song titled The Legend. It aired on April Fool’s Day and was intended as a local joke.

Instead, it triggered a wave of calls from listeners claiming they had already encountered the creature. The broadcast did not introduce the idea so much as give it a common name and a shared shape. What had been isolated, private experiences suddenly became part of a collective narrative.

From that point forward, the Dogman was no longer just a story told in certain counties. It became a recognized figure within American cryptid folklore.

While Michigan remains the center of the legend, reports extend far beyond it. The Appalachian region, particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, holds its own quiet catalogue of encounters.

These accounts are less formal, less publicized, and often deliberately withheld. They exist in conversations rather than publications. Hunters who refuse to return to specific areas. Campers who leave before sunrise without explanation. Locals who will acknowledge something is wrong in certain stretches of land but offer no further detail.

Sightings most often occur near forest edges, rivers, and old logging paths: the places where human activity has cut into the wilderness but not fully replaced it. Witnesses frequently report a sense of being watched before seeing anything at all.

When the creature does move, it does so with speed that seems disproportionate to its size. Accounts describe a gait that shifts between human and animal, never fully settling into either.

Vocalizations are another recurring element. Growls and howls are common, but some witnesses describe something more ambiguous. Sounds that feel imitative rather than natural, as if the creature is attempting to replicate something it has heard.

Perhaps the most consistent element across all accounts is not violence, but fear. Encounters rarely end in physical harm. Instead, witnesses describe an overwhelming sense of dread, followed by a retreat, either by the creature or the observer.

It occupies a particular space in the American imagination: the edge of the woods, where the known world ends and something older, or perhaps simply unrecognized, begins.

Whatever the explanation, misidentification, folklore, or something not yet understood, the consistency of the accounts ensures one thing:

The Dogman is not going away.

Black Water releases March 31, 2026, and your honest review will play a real part in helping this book and this series find its footing. Early readers make more difference than most people realize, and I don’t take that lightly.

So I want to personally thank each and every one of you for taking a chance on this book, these characters, and this strange little world I’ve built. I truly appreciate it.

I think you’re going to have a hell of a good time.

CCC02: Black Water

When the deadly Dogman tears into a group of campers, Cryptid Carl expects just another job and maybe a strange new specimen for his collection. Instead he discovers something far worse.

A sickness is spreading through the waterways of West by God, and Carl finds the same darkness seeping into his own mind. If he cannot stop it soon, the madness swallowing the forests will swallow him too.

With uneasy allies at his back and the ancient caves of Appalachia before him, Carl will have to dig deep to find the source of the madness... or lose himself to it forever.

If you love Robert R. McCammon and Christopher Buehlman, pick up this pulp adventure steeped in Appalachian folklore, haunted hollers, and backwoods monsters. Black Water is one ride you don’t want to miss.

Download Book (Updated)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OEKDRp_5ULbgAkgLmvZ3RS5ISkBaUu7T?usp=drive_link

Please Review on Amazon and Goodreads

The Story So Far

I suspect most of you haven’t read the first book, Hollow King, so I’m including a brief synopsis below to catch you up with the story.

During the violent days of the Appalachian Coal Wars, a powerful coal baron named Indrid Cold (Coal Baron Cold) vanished after a mining disaster that consumed an entire operation in flame. Most believed him dead. They were wrong.

At the same moment in another realm beyond the veil of our world, a catastrophic war was unfolding. A parasitic swarm of carrion insects was devouring entire species of strange and ancient creatures. In desperation, the surviving cryptids gathered beneath the wings of the great Thunderbird. When the Thunderbird unleashed its power against the infestation, the attack tore a hole between worlds, scattering creatures from that hidden realm across Earth.

Decades later, Indrid Cold returned from the ruins of his abandoned mine and murdered his own son and daughter-in-law, leaving their young child orphaned. That child was Carlisle Boone Cold.

Raised alone in the wilds of West by God, Carl grew up half feral and fiercely independent. Over time he built a strange found family of misfit cryptids who had also slipped through the rift between worlds.

Among them are:

• Squonk, a sorrowful empath whose body dissolves into tears
  when confronted with his own reflection.

• Yaya Yellowtop, a blond sasquatch with a knack for radio tinkering and a love of dimes store novels.

• Snarly Yow, a massive hellhound visible only in moonlight and loyal to Carl in her own jealous way.

As an adult, Carl survives as a drifter and occasional conman, traveling from town to town investigating cryptid sightings. The money he makes keeps the taxman from seizing the mountain preserve where he secretly shelters rare and endangered creatures.

Carl’s life changes when Beatrix “Bex” Beaumont, an ambitious college journalist, forces her way into his investigations in search of the story that will launch her career.

Their first major case centers on the reappearance of the legendary and mysterious Mothman and the disturbances surrounding the town of Flatwoods. What begins as another hunt quickly reveals something far worse.

Indrid Cold has returned. Cold is building a cult from the hollowed-out remains of small Appalachian towns. Infested by parasitic carrion bugs, his followers become obedient hosts to an alien intelligence spreading through the mountains.

Carl and Bex narrowly escape an encounter with Cold and his followers while attempting to rescue the Phantom of Flatwoods, an otherworldly being hunted by the cult. During their flight, Carl becomes trapped deep within a cavern system infested with Tommyknockers, goblin creatures that haunt abandoned mines. He survives only because of a mysterious subterranean entity known as Miss Sally, a strange eyeless being who reveals that Carl possesses a rare sensitivity to the fractures between worlds.

Soon after, Carl and his companions pursue another mystery: reports that the legendary Snallygaster is abducting children across Appalachia. When they finally confront the creature, they discover the truth is stranger than the legend. The Snallygaster is protecting a group of runaway children hiding deep in the forest.

Their discovery draws the attention of Cold’s cult. Two monstrous servants of the infestation attack in an attempt to capture the Snallygaster and bend it to Cold’s will. Carl and his allies manage to drive them off, but Carl is gravely wounded in the battle.

When he wakes in a hospital, he finds himself under interrogation by mysterious agents known only as the Men in Black, who seem to know far more about cryptids and the hidden world than they admit.

Meanwhile, Cold’s influence spreads across the mountains. Entire towns are quietly overtaken by the parasitic cult. In a final confrontation, Carl learns the horrifying truth: his own parents were not killed long ago as he believed. They were absorbed into the infestation.

Cold’s ultimate goal is far larger than simple domination. He seeks control of the Thunderbird itself. With that power he could tear open the veil between worlds and spread his influence across every reality.

In a desperate last stand, Carl, his companions, and the Men in Black unite against Cold and his growing army. The confrontation ends where the nightmare began: deep inside the ruined coal mine where Cold first vanished.

Carl lures his grandfather back into the mine and destroys it in a final explosion. He survives only by instinctively slipping through the veil between worlds for the first time.

Cold’s cult collapses, and the immediate threat is stopped.

But victory comes with a cost.

Carl’s beloved mountain preserve, the sanctuary he fought to protect, is quietly seized by the shadow government behind the Men in Black. The same secret powers that claim to protect humanity now own the land that shelters the world’s remaining cryptids.

Carl is offered a choice. He can lose everything he fought for. Or he can work for them. Carl chooses to stay on the mountain as its reluctant steward, guarding the fragile boundary between worlds and the creatures that slipped through it. But the veil is thinning. And the war that scattered the cryptids across Earth may not be over.

Once upon a time, I was in a job interview. When they asked me where I was from, their eyes went wide at the answer.

West Virginia.

In the imagination of coastal snobbery, West Virginia is a mythical place they aren’t quite sure where to locate on a map. Only bad things happen there. Drugs. Coal. Trailers. Incest. Appalachia is rarely allowed to be a place. It’s a warning.

In stories, it becomes shorthand for decay, ignorance, and menace. A backdrop for violence. A landscape that explains cruelty by proximity alone. When something goes wrong in a narrative, the hills are blamed. The woods become complicit. The people are reduced to symptoms of terrain.

This isn’t an accident. It’s convenience.

Appalachia is made the villain because it absorbs guilt easily. Outsiders can project their fears onto it without consequence. Poverty becomes moral failure. Isolation becomes savagery. Tradition becomes stagnation. The land is framed as hostile so no one has to admit what was done to it or who benefited.

Horror, thrillers, and crime stories repeat the pattern relentlessly. The setting is rural. The roads are narrow. The locals are suspicious. Violence feels inevitable because the place itself is treated as diseased. Appalachia isn’t written as a victim of history. It’s written as its natural outcome.

But places don’t fail on their own.

Appalachia was not born poor or broken. It was stripped. Timber clear-cut. Coal carved out. Rivers poisoned. Labor extracted until bodies wore down and companies moved on. When the economy collapsed, the blame stayed behind with the people who couldn’t leave. The villain escaped in railcars and balance sheets.

Still, the stories keep pointing at the hills.

It’s easier to say the land is cursed than to say it was exploited. Easier to frame communities as backward than to admit they were deliberately underdeveloped. Easier to turn Appalachia into a monster than to reckon with the systems that needed it quiet and compliant.

This is why Appalachia makes such a “good” antagonist in fiction: it doesn’t argue back.

The region is cast as unknowable, lawless, and threatening, just wild enough to justify any violence done within it. Outsiders enter the story already afraid, already superior, already convinced the danger is inherent. Whatever they do next feels reasonable. Even necessary.

But Appalachia isn’t a villain. Its a witness. It remembers what was taken and who took it. It holds onto old injuries. It doesn’t clean itself up for narrative comfort. When stories turn dark here, it isn’t because the land demands blood. It’s because unresolved history always resurfaces.

The irony is that Appalachia is often blamed for the very qualities that kept it alive. Self-reliance. Distrust of authority. Tight-knit communities. Oral tradition. These traits become “threatening” only when viewed from a distance that expects obedience and uniformity.

In horror especially, Appalachia is framed as the thing that corrupts outsiders. But more often, it’s the place where outsiders reveal who they already are. The violence doesn’t come from the soil. It comes from entitlement colliding with a place that refuses to flatten itself for consumption.

Calling Appalachia the villain allows people to enjoy the aesthetic of ruin without responsibility. To consume stories of suffering without asking who profits from the image. To feel relieved that the darkness lives somewhere else.

But the land isn’t evil.

It’s injured.

And injured places don’t lash out. They endure. They wait. They reflect back whatever is brought into them.

If Appalachia keeps showing up as the villain in other people’s stories, it’s because it holds a mirror most of them would rather not look into.

The hills aren’t the threat.

They’re the record.

In the 1730s, in what is now Frederick County, Maryland, the **Schneller Geist**—the _Quick Spirit_—first took shape. German settlers described a winged, reptilian creature that flew low over farmland and hills, screeched through the night, and attacked livestock and people alike. It was often said to drink blood.

Nearly two centuries passed before the Snallygaster hit newsprint. In 1909, the _Middletown Valley Register_ ran a series of sensational stories describing bat-like wings, a metallic beak, and an appetite for blood. Scholars generally agree this wave exaggerated existing folklore, but it didn’t invent the creature. It repackaged something much older. The Snallygaster is now considered one of the oldest cryptids in American folklore.

It resurfaces from time to time in the hills of Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. It appears where the land is already strained. Coal towns. Railroad corridors. Migrant camps. Borderlands where people pass through but rarely remain. It doesn’t stalk fairy-tale forests. It circles farms. It hovers over hollers and preys on the exposed.

The Snallygaster is relentless but not clever. It doesn’t tempt or deceive. It descends, feeds, and moves on—consumption without interest in what’s left behind. It is a monster of depletion, feeding on communities built around extraction.

Coal takes the mountain. Timber takes the forest. Industry takes the worker.

Something always eats first.

Of course, folks tried to kill it. Bounties were printed in newspapers. The belief that it could be stopped with enough traps and guns is part of the Appalachian spirit. We prefer monsters we can deal with, if we’re willing to try hard enough. But the truth is, it never was stoppable. The Snallygaster won the land.

She reflects a fear older than cryptids: the fear of being drained dry by something that doesn’t live where you do. Something that arrives, feeds, and disappears, leaving you alone with the damage. The modern Snallygaster belongs to an era when the sky filled with machines and the land stopped being able to heal between assaults.

The legend didn’t end. It faded into normality. The monster lost its novelty. You don’t tell stories about what everyone already expects. She didn’t vanish, she was absorbed into daily life, where her behavior stopped being shocking and started being familiar. The Snallygaster is remembered as a creature defined entirely by appetite, operating without remorse or permanence, feeding on places that were told they should be grateful for the attention.

It never needed to come back.

It never really left.

In the late 1920s, a coal operator named Conley T. Snidow had big dreams and wild ambitions. He bought a stretch of land outside Princeton, West Virginia. It was raw, wooded, and unwanted. Where others saw waste, he imagined a dance hall, a man-made lake, and rides lit by bulbs and laughter. The park offered cheap distractions to families desperate for relief during the Great Depression: a Ferris wheel, a swing ride, and a pool fed by cold mountain water. Live music on the weekends. For a while, it worked.

Then people started dying.

Some said the land was cursed. Others said it was just bad luck. There are few things more dangerous than neglect masked with optimism. A boy was run over by a truck near the rides. People make mistakes. A girl was hurled from the swing ride, her body broken on impact. Machines fail. But land doesn’t forget simply because someone paints over the bloodstains.

Long before there were ticket booths, the Shawnee fought and died on that ground. The details are disputed, as they often are when history becomes inconvenient.

As the accidents piled up, attendance dropped. Maintenance slipped further. The park closed quietly in the late 1960s. The rides were left where they stood, rusting in place, waiting for customers who would never return. Nature reclaimed the grounds faster than anyone expected. Grass split the concrete. Trees wrapped themselves around steel. The lake went still.

Stories followed. Children laughing near the empty pool. A girl in a pink dress near the swings. Cold spots. Shadows. The usual stuff. But what sets Lake Shawnee apart isn’t the ghost stories, it’s how little imagination they require. Like abandoned military bases or the lost colony of Roanoke, the place feels deserted mid-motion, as if something paused and never resumed.

This is not a site of grand horror. There was no single catastrophic event to anchor the legend. No fire. No massacre. Just a slow accumulation of loss stacked on land that had already absorbed more than its share.

When the laughter stopped, all that remained was a fenced-off Ferris wheel decaying against the trees. It’s a massacre tired of pretending to be a playground. The real haunting isn’t that something stayed behind; It’s the history ignored, safety assumed, and responsibility deferred.

Lake Shawnee remains to remind you how quickly painted smiles crack when brushed over old grief.

“Cryptid Carl is for readers of Robert R. McCammon and Christopher Buehlman—a pulp adventure steeped in Appalachian folklore, following a half-feral drifter who hunts cryptids with the darkly comedic savagery of Evil Dead.”

A Brutal, Blood-Soaked Thrill Ride Through Appalachian Folklore. Cryptid Horror at its Finest.

A half-feral drifter raised in the shadow of Storm Mountain, Carl has spent years roaming broken, backwoods towns, hunting the uncanny creatures of folklore. When the mysterious Mothman begins terrorizing a dying town, Carl expects just another job and maybe a strange new specimen for his collection.

Instead, he stumbles into a nightmare swallowing Appalachia whole.

A parasitic force is spreading gangrenous grins and emptying hollers across the land. And at the center of it all waits Indrid Cold, an inhuman manipulator who tears open Carl’s oldest wounds and turn his memories against him.

To stop him, Carl must confront the truth of his bloodline, the monsters stalking the dark, and the ghosts of the past he’s buried for too long.

If Appalachian horror, haunted hollers, and backwoods monsters are your thing, this is one ride you don’t want to miss.

Buy Now

Praise

“I didn’t expect to get emotional, yet the story explores loss and identity in a very touching manner. The story stays with you, I assure you.”
—Kenneth A.

“You had me at the first chapter. Your story was a great mix of imagination, intrigue and insightful characters. I’m looking forward to reading your next creation.”
—Mica M.

“...hooked from the first chapter”
—John A.

“..couldn’t put it down, easy reading.”
—Bill B.

“Crazy fun!... an absurd dip into Appalachian folklore”
—Jacob B.

“Beautifully strange and surprisingly moving”
—Melissa K.

“Beautiful storytelling in a spooky package”
—Stirling C.

“...highly recommend this book...”
—Michael A.

Art Inspired by the Book

Buy Now

Horror has rules, even when it pretends it doesn’t. Break them and the story responds. Exploit something weaker than you. Open a door you were warned about. Treat people as disposable. The punishment is never fair. It’s proportionate in the way God’s wrath is proportionate. Horror is moral the way gravity is moral. It doesn’t argue. It demonstrates. Step too far and you fall. Ignore the warnings and something takes notice.

Every good horror story is about consequence. Sometimes you’re punished for your own sins. Sometimes you’re paying for the sins of a father, a system, or a master you refuse to acknowledge. At its core, horror asks a single question and won’t let it go: What happens if you’re wrong? Wrong about the world. Wrong about your place in it. Wrong about what you owe other people. The genre doesn’t care how confident you are. It only cares what you do when certainty collapses and your hubris goes with it.

This is why horror survives when trends burn out. Before Walt came swinging his big D, sanitizing our childhood, stories for children were blunt morality tales. We call them fairy tales, but they were horror stories first. Stray from the path. Ignore the warning. Trust the wrong thing. See what happens.

The monster almost never appears at random. It’s summoned by neglect, cruelty, arrogance, or indifference. Sometimes the sin is small, a joke at the wrong time, a lie told to save face. Sometimes it’s systemic: institutions that grind people down and call it efficiency. Horror doesn’t weigh intent. It weighs outcome.

That’s why villains so often think they’re right. They’re chasing knowledge. Progress. Profit. Salvation. Horror doesn’t punish curiosity itself. It punishes extraction without cost. Taking without accounting. Building without regard for what’s buried underneath. When the reckoning comes, it doesn’t explain itself and it doesn’t promise redemption.

Good behavior doesn’t guarantee survival. Innocence isn’t armor. Horror is moral, but it isn’t just. The world is uneven. Harm spreads outward whether it’s deserved or not. But even in that cruelty, there’s order. Those who refuse to see others as human are often stripped of their own humanity. Those who deny responsibility are eventually consumed by it.

The characters who last are the ones who learn the rules fastest. They listen. They adapt. They stop pretending they’re above consequence. They accept that their actions move the world, whether they intend to or not.

That’s why horror feels honest. It doesn’t flatter us. It doesn’t tell us we’re special. It tells us we’re accountable and that the universe isn’t passive. It tells us that something is always watching.

In Appalachia, this isn’t philosophy. It’s practical knowledge. You don’t poison a creek and expect it not to poison you back. You don’t mistreat the land and assume it won’t remember. Horror draws from the same logic. It’s a genre built by people who know nothing disappears just because you refuse to look at it.

Horror is moral because it refuses to lie.

It shows us the shape of our choices after time has had its say.

On September 12, 1952, something burned hot across the night sky over Braxton County, West Virginia. Like any rational people staring up into the unknown, the locals assumed it was a meteor. A group of boys, joined by a few adults carrying flashlights, followed the glowing tail into the hills outside Flatwoods, hoping to find a prize: space rock.

They found something.

It weren’t no rock.

What they saw, they could never fully agree on. Accounts describe a tall figure standing at the top of a rise, silhouetted against the trees. Ten feet tall. Maybe more. A shape like a hooded cloak or an armored dress. Something like a face, with glowing eyes that didn’t blink.

It didn’t chase them. Didn’t speak. It just hovered there, unmoving, watching. A metallic smell filled the air. A mist burned their throats and eyes. Then it was gone. Like a skunk or a squid, it vanished and left only a choking cloud behind.

By morning, the town was buzzing. Skeptics moved in fast. Owls. Military flares. Mass hysteria. Radiation panic. The explanations stacked up neat and tidy, but none of them stuck. Because the witnesses didn’t just report a sighting.

They reported effects.

Nausea. Burning skin. Lingering illness.

The Flatwoods Phantom never fit cleanly into any category. It wasn’t a traditional Appalachian haunt. It weren’t no animal. It felt like technology without machinery. Too modern for ancient myth. Too strange for a simple answer. And that tracks, considering the moment it arrived.

The early ’50s were soaked in uncertainty. The Cold War was young. The sky had become something to fear. Rockets. Satellites. Tests. Distant decisions with consequences no one could see. Appalachia, as usual, sat beneath it all, watching things pass overhead without explanation or consent.

The Flatwoods Phantom reflects that anxiety perfectly. A figure descending from the sky, half cloaked in mystery, half constructed. Silent. Toxic. Indifferent to the damage it left behind.

Unlike legends like Mothman, which linger and repeat, the Flatwoods Monster is fixed in time. One night. One encounter. One unresolved moment.

A question mark burned into local memory.

The Flatwoods Phantom reminds us how little control we’ve ever had over the sky, our land, and the powers that operate above us, whether we agree to them or not.

Dead center in West by God Virginia, there’s a place I’d like to send a fair few loudmouths on X. Not to tour, but to stay awhile.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was built on hope. The mid-19th century idea that the mentally ill weren’t possessed or criminal, just people who needed help. Reform was in fashion. Asylums were going to be humane now. Moral treatment. Care instead of chains.

The building was meant to heal. A Gothic Revival behemoth stretching nearly a quarter mile. Long wings, strict symmetry, windows for light and air. Architecture as medicine. Stability made from stone.

I sometimes wonder if the architects felt like God did after building something beautiful, then watching it go to hell the moment people got involved.

It opened late, underfunded, and already overwhelmed. Built for hundreds, it swallowed thousands. Hallways meant for calm walks became holding pens. Sunlit rooms filled with filthy mattresses on bare floors. Bodies stacked like inventory. Treatment collapsed into containment. Care became custody.

It didn’t take long for the inconvenient to be mixed with the violent. People broken by grief, poverty, or disobedience. Men ground down by labor. Children who didn’t fit the mold. Women who talked too much. (They live on TikTok now) The asylum didn’t treat suffering. It cataloged it.

Hydrotherapy. Restraints. Isolation. Then lobotomies. Electroshock. Sedation. Whatever kept them quiet and out of sight.

Once inside, most were erased. Families moved on. Records disappeared. Time finished the job.

Today, people trade ghost stories. Voices in empty wings. Footsteps after midnight. Figures in broken windows. Machinery groaning back to life. Shadows with no owner. Too many lives compressed into one structure, with no clean ending.

But the real horror is when society decides that suffering can be managed by removing it from sight. When institutions designed to protect become warehouses of the inconvenient. A slow erosion of thousands of souls until struggle was replaced with silence.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum opened its doors in 1864 and only shut them in 1994.

Today, it stands as a monument to those who confuse control for care.

“Cryptid Carl is for readers of Robert R. McCammon and Christopher Buehlman—a pulp adventure steeped in Appalachian folklore, following a half-feral drifter who hunts cryptids with the darkly comedic savagery of Evil Dead.”

A Brutal, Blood-Soaked Thrill Ride Through Appalachian Folklore. Cryptid Horror at its Finest.

A half-feral drifter raised in the shadow of Storm Mountain, Carl has spent years roaming broken, backwoods towns, hunting the uncanny creatures of folklore. When the mysterious Mothman begins terrorizing a dying town, Carl expects just another job and maybe a strange new specimen for his collection.

Instead, he stumbles into a nightmare swallowing Appalachia whole.

A parasitic force is spreading gangrenous grins and emptying hollers across the land. And at the center of it all waits Indrid Cold, an inhuman manipulator who tears open Carl’s oldest wounds and turn his memories against him.

To stop him, Carl must confront the truth of his bloodline, the monsters stalking the dark, and the ghosts of the past he’s buried for too long.

If Appalachian horror, haunted hollers, and backwoods monsters are your thing, this is one ride you don’t want to miss.

Buy Now

Praise

“I didn’t expect to get emotional, yet the story explores loss and identity in a very touching manner. The story stays with you, I assure you.”
—Kenneth A.

“You had me at the first chapter. Your story was a great mix of imagination, intrigue and insightful characters. I’m looking forward to reading your next creation.”
—Mica M.

“...hooked from the first chapter”
—John A.

“..couldn’t put it down, easy reading.”
—Bill B.

“Crazy fun!... an absurd dip into Appalachian folklore”
—Jacob B.

“Beautifully strange and surprisingly moving”
—Melissa K.

“Beautiful storytelling in a spooky package”
—Stirling C.

“...highly recommend this book...”
—Michael A.

Art Inspired by the Book

Buy Now

The other night I watched a film called The Substance. It bills itself as psychological body horror. The premise: a wildly successful Hollywood starlet ages out of relevance and gets discarded. Boo frickin’ hoo. She’s rich. She’s beautiful. She’s comfortably retired with a milquetoast love interest who worships the ground she walks on. A soft landing by any honest measure.

Instead, she throws it all away chasing the spotlight like a junkie scratching for one more hit. It’s a fable about the addiction of adulation, about mistaking applause for oxygen. Darkly funny. Honestly, it worked as a better black comedy than Death Becomes Her. I was riveted the whole time.

But scared?
No. Not once.

Horror doesn’t belong to clean hands. It comes from factory floors and back hollers, from night shifts and failing towns, from places where people use themselves up and pay for it later. Academic abstractions can’t compete with callused palms and bad backs. Real horror comes from knowing, firsthand, how fragile a human body actually is.

Blue-collar people don’t need to imagine danger. They live with it. They work around machines that’ll kill them for a moment’s inattention. They drive roads slick with black ice. They hunt, cut, weld, climb, crawl, and haul. They understand injury and exhaustion because they’ve earned both. They live paycheck to paycheck, every month balanced on the edge of ruin. Jostle them just a little and watch a whole life come apart.

Consequence is the soil horror grows best in.

The genre has always known this, even when the audience forgot. The earliest horror wasn’t gothic luxury. It was plague pits and famine. War. Bodies stacked without names. Modern horror follows the same bloodline. It’s about being trapped in a job you can’t quit. About towns that die the minute the plant shuts down. About mines that collapse, mills that poison rivers, factories that vanish overnight and leave behind nothing but rust and debt. It’s about systems that take everything they can and leave the rest to rot.

The monster is just a face you give the weight of anxiety and dread sitting on your chest while you lie awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering how the hell you’re going to make it through. It’s the quiet terror of being chewed up and replaced. Horror is what happens when you are treated as expendable.

You see it in slashers, where the killer is unstoppable because work never stops. In possession stories, where the body becomes a tool something else uses until it breaks. In the isolation of rural horror, no help is coming. You fix it yourself, or you don’t fix it at all.

That’s why horror resonates so deeply in working-class spaces. It already speaks the language. It doesn’t trust authority. Official explanations come after the damage. Reports get written when the bodies are already cold and counted. The sheriff is useless. The company lies. The experts arrive too late. Survival belongs to people who understand the terrain, the tools, and the cost of hesitation, to people who know fear isn’t abstract.

Horror is blue collar. It gets its hands dirty.

The story of the Mothman doesn’t begin with folklore, but a police report.

It was 11:30 p.m. on November 15, 1966, when Roger was cruising his Chevrolet Bel Air with Linda, Steve, and Mary. They drove out past town, where the maze of earthen bunkers and moss-choked concrete igloos of the old TNT Area lay rotting in the dark.

That’s when they saw it.

Something tall stood where nothing should’ve been. Black wings unfurled. Two red eyes burned like lit cigarettes in the night.

Roger slowed to get a better look and that hesitation got them noticed. Confused and bewildered, Roger slammed the accelerator and hurled the car down Route 62. The engine screamed. The speedometer climbed. And above them, moving with unnatural smoothness, the figure kept pace, nearly a hundred miles an hour in pitch-black air, while Roger fought the wheel.

It followed them to the edge of town, then vanished.

They tore through Point Pleasant and rushed to the sheriff’s office, piling out of the car shaking, shouting over one another, trying to explain what had chased them out of the night. The sheriff took the report seriously, later noting that all four appeared genuinely frightened and sober-minded.

That night marked the beginning of the thirteen-month period that would come to be known as the Mothman Flap.

Accounts vary, as they always do. That’s what happens when hundreds of people start seeing the same thing from different angles. But the consistency lives in what wasn’t reported.

It didn’t mutilate livestock. It didn’t leave bodies behind. Nobody vanished, as far as anyone can prove. Some reported paralysis during their encounters. Others said it left them sick with dread sitting heavy in the gut and nausea that wouldn’t pass. Others simply refused to talk about it.

Then the Silver Bridge fell.

Stress compounded over time. Metal fatigue. A single point of failure doing what single points of failure always do. Forty-six people died when the bridge dropped into the Ohio River.

And the sightings stopped.
No wings.
No eyes.
No watchers on the road.

Maybe the town was too broken with grief to keep looking at the sky. When you’re counting bodies, there’s no room left for phantasms. Or maybe the Mothman was never meant to linger. Appalachian folklore understands omens don’t cause disaster, they surface when pressure builds, when systems near collapse. The Mothman wasn’t hunting Point Pleasant. It was a signal flare fired from the dark.

What gets lost in the merchandising is how little spectacle there ever was. No prophecies. No cosmic speeches. Just a shape at the edge of vision and the feeling that something had already slipped its leash. The terror wasn’t in what it did. It was in what it seemed to know.

That’s why the legend never settles. It resurfaces now and then, near disasters, watching with the same unblinking gaze.

In Appalachia, we d

on’t ask whether the Mothman is real.

We ask what breaks next.

In the urgency of World War II, the feds tore up eight thousand acres of forest and farmland along the Ohio River. A temporary measure that left a permanent scar. They erected a maze of earthen bunkers, rail spurs, and chemical stockpiles. Half-sunk, moss-covered concrete igloos are arranged across the landscape with ritualistic precision. The purpose was simple enough: store explosives far from prying eyes, and far from consequence.

After Uncle Adolf ate a bullet and Japan dined on a couple of expensive mushrooms, the land was abandoned with a shrug and a stack of paperwork.

Places like this are chosen not because they are empty, but because they are expendable.

Inside each bunker sat stacks of TNT, ammonium nitrate, and incendiaries waiting for a purpose that never came. Waste was buried or burned. Chemicals leaked. Fish floated belly-up along the Ohio. Mutated frogs turned up in ditches and hollers. The land was left pocked with contaminated soil where only death seems at home.

Today, they’ll tell you it’s safe now. Governments always do. The area is quietly monitored, inspected, documented. Clipboards replaced warning signs. But Appalachia has a long memory.

Before long, locals began trading yarns. Strange lights drifting between bunkers. Sounds echoing from structures sealed for decades. Radios crackling to life without signal. Compasses spinning uselessly in steady hands. Children dare each other to touch the bunker doors, convinced something on the other side could feel them.

And yes, eventually, the black-winged thing with burning red eyes took flight from those barrow ruins and into headlines across the nation. The creature that put Point Pleasant on the map.

But the truth is, the area doesn’t feel haunted in the traditional sense. There are no rattling chains or wailing spirits. Not even a polite one waiting to be acknowledged. What lingers here is an unease that settles in the chest like heavy air.

Appalachia, like its people, holds grudges.

We know that when something is buried improperly, it doesn’t stay buried. It seeps. It spreads. It works its way back to the surface. The land isn’t haunted by monsters, but by consequence.

TNT Area
6182 Ohio River Road
Point Pleasant, West Virginia
38.929768, -82.076155

“Cryptid Carl is for readers of Robert R. McCammon and Christopher Buehlman—a pulp adventure steeped in Appalachian folklore, following a half-feral drifter who hunts cryptids with the darkly comedic savagery of Evil Dead.”

A Brutal, Blood-Soaked Thrill Ride Through Appalachian Folklore. Cryptid Horror at its Finest.

A half-feral drifter raised in the shadow of Storm Mountain, Carl has spent years roaming broken, backwoods towns, hunting the uncanny creatures of folklore. When the mysterious Mothman begins terrorizing a dying town, Carl expects just another job and maybe a strange new specimen for his collection.

Instead, he stumbles into a nightmare swallowing Appalachia whole.

A parasitic force is spreading gangrenous grins and emptying hollers across the land. And at the center of it all waits Indrid Cold, an inhuman manipulator who tears open Carl’s oldest wounds and turn his memories against him.

To stop him, Carl must confront the truth of his bloodline, the monsters stalking the dark, and the ghosts of the past he’s buried for too long.

If Appalachian horror, haunted hollers, and backwoods monsters are your thing, this is one ride you don’t want to miss.

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Praise

“I didn’t expect to get emotional, yet the story explores loss and identity in a very touching manner. The story stays with you, I assure you.”
—Kenneth A.

“You had me at the first chapter. Your story was a great mix of imagination, intrigue and insightful characters. I’m looking forward to reading your next creation.”
—Mica M.

“...hooked from the first chapter”
—John A.

“..couldn’t put it down, easy reading.”
—Bill B.

“Crazy fun!... an absurd dip into Appalachian folklore”
—Jacob B.

“Beautifully strange and surprisingly moving”
—Melissa K.

“Beautiful storytelling in a spooky package”
—Stirling C.

“...highly recommend this book...”
—Michael A.

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