Four hundred years ago, Copperwood made a promise. The debt just came due.
Something ancient lives beneath the earth. It hasn't eaten in a very long time.
Spencer Cole has spent years on the ragged edge of the paranormal, chasing shadows and legends around the world since a single night in Herat, Afghanistan shattered everything he thought he knew was real. When an old military friend calls in a favor, he trades a whiskey-soaked D.C. apartment for a posting nobody wants: interim sheriff of Copperwood, Maine—a dying, unincorporated mining settlement, the last scrap of civilization before the Canadian border. The job is simple. Find out what happened to the town's beloved sheriff, who walked into the northern woods one morning and was never seen again.
What he finds is a town under siege. Animals are torn apart in the night. People go missing. Strange shadows move through the trees. Mysterious eyes peer out from the nighttime forest.
Centuries earlier, an ancient compact between the Dutch settlers who built Copperwood and the Wabanaki people who knew better than to disturb the beyond sealed something unspeakable beneath the earth. A breed of supernatural predators the Wabanaki call the Kiwakwa. Older than the mine, older than the town, older than nightmares themselves. Now the compact is breaking. In a mysterious July deep freeze, Spencer comes face to face with what's been living in those woods, and realizes that what happened to him in Herat wasn't the end of something.
It was the beginning.
Copperwood is a supernatural thriller rooted in cosmic horror, Indigenous mythology, and the bone-deep dread of small-town secrets that have been kept too long. Gritty, atmospheric, and laced with dark humor, it delivers relentless pacing, a cast of unforgettable characters, and a mythology rich enough to anchor an entire series.
If you love military protagonists, ancient evil, creature horror, New England gothic, and secret society fiction, this is your next obsession.
