Every hollow keeps a ledger. Black Hollow keeps two: one for the births, and one for the debts.

Mara has caught babies in Ransom County longer than most of its mothers have been alive. When she comes back to Black Hollow, she tells herself it is only the work that brought her home. Then she finds the old book no one will admit to keeping, its pages divided into two columns in a hand a century dead. Records of births on the left. Deaths and renderings on the right. One to the generation, and no more.

The hollow has always paid its price quietly, in croup and cold slopes and stones that were never cut. Now the debt has come due again, and Mara is the only one left who can read the terms, or refuse them. But a bargain that old does not forgive a broken promise, and the mountain remembers every name written down.

The Midwife of Black Hollow is Book One of The Black Hollow Cycle, a series of Appalachian folk horror where family secrets, inherited bargains, and the land itself refuse to stay buried.

Perfect for readers of atmospheric folk horror, Appalachian gothic, and slow-burn dread built from bloodlines, old debts, and small-town silence.