When a local pizzeria becomes the site of a brutal, unexplainable attack, sixteen-year-old Vincent Granger and his friends uncover something ancient stirring beneath the cedar swamp. The adults call it hysteria. The sheriff calls it a bear. But the truth is older, heavier, and still waiting to be remembered.
As the town bends itself around denial, Vincent meets Mira Thorn, a homeschooled girl whose mother vanished under mysterious circumstances. Mira knows the rules of Duswood’s forgetting and what happens when grief takes shape. Together they begin to see the pattern others refuse to face: a creature born from the town’s buried sorrow, a being made of earth and memory, bound to something far darker than anyone dares speak aloud.
But some bindings don’t break, they unravel.
Hollow Stone is a haunting, atmospheric blend of quiet horror and small-town mystery, perfect for readers of Small Favors, The Blackwater series, and Twin Peaks. In Duswood, silence is a form of survival, and what’s forgotten never stays buried for long.
N.B. Cross writes quiet horror and dark fiction rooted in memory, grief, and small towns where the trees seem to breathe. His debut collection, Static Between the Trees, explores the eerie spaces between what is lost and what refuses to fade. Drawing inspiration from Robert Dunbar, Charles L. Grant, and the haunting mood of David Lynch, he writes stories where silence unsettles more than screams. He lives in Michigan, where rural landscapes and cold winters often find their way onto the page.