Charred

THE WOODS REMEMBER. The RULES exist for a reason.

• Never cross the stone line after sunset.
• Never answer when the wind speaks your name.
• Always come home when the clock stops ticking.

For generations, the people of Charred, Maine, have followed these warnings without question. Most no longer remember where the rules came from. They simply know that breaking them brings misfortune.

When nine-year-old Lacy Johnson vanishes into the ancient Widowwood on a night when every clock in town stops at once, Sheriff Clancy Mercer is forced to confront the stories he spent his life dismissing as folklore. As search parties disappear, impossible symbols emerge beneath the soil, and the forest begins to reshape reality itself, the town discovers that the rules were never superstition.

They were survival instructions.

Beneath the roots of the Widowwood lies something older than the town. Older than memory. A buried intelligence waiting for the final piece of a centuries-old design.

Now Lacy stands at the center of a nightmare that stretches beyond the boundaries of the world, and her family must descend into a landscape of living forests, impossible geometry, and body-warping horrors to bring her home.

But some things are not lost. Some things are chosen.

A relentless blend of cosmic horror, folk horror, and visceral body horror, CHARRED is a dark descent into a world where the land is alive, the woods are watching, and every forgotten legend hides a terrible truth.

For fans of Stephen King, Adam Nevill, Nick Cutter, and Christopher Buehlman.

The rules were never meant to protect the town. They were meant to protect the world from what lives beneath it.

From the author of Coil