Part of Robert Grim
First published 2013
Black Spring looks like any other Hudson Valley town, but residents know better. The Black Rock Witch walks their streets day and night, her eyes and mouth sewn shut with thick thread. She enters homes without invitation and stands beside sleeping children for hours. The town's elders maintain strict surveillance to contain their curse, using technology to prevent outsiders from learning their secret. Nobody born in Black Spring can ever leave. Nobody who settles there escapes. The teenagers grow restless under these restrictions. They decide to film the witch and share footage online, breaking generations of careful silence. Their viral videos trigger something ancient and terrible. The town descends into medieval brutality as old fears resurface. The witch's sewn eyes must never be opened, but the damage spreads beyond anything the elders anticipated. Thomas Olde Heuvelt transforms a quiet American town into a prison where supernatural terror meets modern rebellion, and both threaten to destroy everything.
Genres: american-fiction, horror, supernatural, contemporary, thriller, dark-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, claustrophobic, dark, dread-filled, gritty, suspenseful
Tropes: ancient-curse, forbidden-knowledge, generational-conflict, town-secret
Setting: Black Spring, Hudson Valley
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
384 pages · Paperback · Tor Nightfire
Content warnings: body-horror, gore, violence