The Fallen

A Novel

A West Virginia mining town hides a monstrous secret in this modern masterwork of skin-crawling horror

They say you can’t go home again. Sometimes that advice should be heeded.

Henry Sleep’s childhood memories of Saul’s Run are dark and jumbled images that terrify and confuse him in his all-too-frequent nightmares. When his mother’s horrible death and a bitter falling-out with his preacher father drove Henry from his West Virginia hometown almost ten years earlier, he knew he could never look back. But now the reverend Quincy Sleep is also dead, shockingly by his own hand, and the prodigal son must return to the tiny mining town where all of his most terrible secrets dwell.

And he will not be welcomed back with open arms. Not by Sheriff Harold Crawford, who hides a taste for dark things behind his lawman facade. Not by Emily, the girlfriend Henry left behind, now shackled to a dying mother. Not by his one-time best friend, Perry Holland, who feels nothing for him now but a raging, inexplicable hatred. But if Henry hopes ever to sleep again, he will stay in Saul’s Run until he solves the mystery of his father’s death . . . and forces himself to remember what he and Perry found stirring in the hills outside of town many years ago.