The reservoir is two-thirds gone, and the town it drowned sixty years ago is rising out of the cracked mud — streets, a schoolhouse, a church with the bell still hanging in the steeple.
Cora Holt inspects the dams nobody else will touch: the old ones, the orphaned ones, the ones whose records don't match the concrete in the ground. Mércy Hollow is losing water faster than any model allows, and the state has sent her to find the leak. What she finds is a valley going dry on schedule — and people walking down into the little water that's left, calmly, on their own feet, and lying down in it.
The town wasn't only flooded. It was hidden. Three generations ago its founders made a bargain with something already old in the bedrock — something the water was meant to keep buried. The drought has uncovered it. The debt is being collected. And everyone who knew the terms drowned with the town.
To stop it, Cora has to do what the engineer in her refuses to accept: stop hunting for who to blame, and start learning what the valley is owed — before it decides she's the next payment.
The Drowning Season is a slow-burn folk horror novel with a cold cosmic heart: drowned-town dread, an ancient debt, and a creditor that wears no face.
- Series
- Something Remembers · No. 2