The Hidden Gods of Appalachia: A Spicy Folkloric Horror-Romance Novella by Jessica Leigh

About this Book:After the death of her mother and the disappearance of her younger brother, Charlie fled her Appalachian hometown and never looked back.Ten years later, a distant aunt’s death pulls her home.But the land she returns to is nothing like the one she left. Unchecked development has hollowed out the town that raised her, replacing familiarity with tension and quiet dread. Locals whisper about people vanishing into the surrounding forests. Their bodies are later discovered miles away — mutilated and marked with strange carved symbols.Symbols Charlie recognizes.As memories she buried claw their way back to the surface, Charlie is drawn into the orbit of Warren, a private detective whose dangerous magnetism is matched only by his certainty that she’s connected to what’s happening. . . and she may be the only one who can stop it.Because whatever is haunting the forests has already taken everything from her once before.Now Charlie must decide how much of herself she’s willing to sacrifice to break a dark pattern that refuses to stay buried.This book features:🌲 Appalachian folk horror🩸 Ritual symbols and generational trauma🔥 Dark romantic tension🕯️ Occult elements rooted in place and memory🖤 Psychological horror with emotional stakes THE HIDDEN GODS OF APPALACHIA blends the haunting and disturbing complex family dynamics of Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior, the intimate and unsettling folk-horror atmosphere and creeping sense of dread of T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones, and Brom’s Slewfoot, and the intense romance and emotional chemistry of Harley LaRoux’s Her Soul to Take, while maintaining a strange, atmospheric horror that is rooted in regional Appalachian lore.Perfect for readers who love atmospheric folk horror, small-town mysteries, and slow-burn tension threaded through dread.