The Hollow Farm Chronicles - Paperback

by D. Clayton (Author)

"The land takes what it takes."

Somewhere in the hills of Kentucky, there is a farm that remembers everything.

It remembers the Cherokee priests who bound something ancient beneath the oldest tree in the orchard - something that was not evil, exactly, but was not safe. It remembers Elijah McBride, the frontier preacher who rode out of Fort Boonesborough and never quite rode back the same. It remembers the Civil War soldier who came home carrying more than the war's smell, the summer a little girl drowned in the heat, the year Silas Bruce was found tied to an orchard ladder like a scarecrow - and what happened to his wife Cora in the upstairs bathtub afterward.

It remembers every family that has worked this land, loved it, and been undone by it. And it is patient. The land is always patient.

The Hollow Farm Chronicles is a novel in eighteen stories, spanning six centuries of history on a single piece of American soil. From the frontier settlements of the 1700s to the dust-choked grief of the 1930s to the present day, each story peels back another layer of a place that has seen too much to ever be ordinary again. The dead here do not simply vanish. They settle into the land like roots - and roots, given enough time, split stone.

For fans of Southern Gothic horror and Americana darkness, Hollow Farm Chronicles is a haunting, beautifully rendered debut - a story about what the land holds, what it takes, and what it never, ever lets go.