Nine workplace accidents in four months. One worker who walked into the fog and never came back. And an insurance claim that reads like someone hired a lawyer to write a ghost story.
Dana Pratt has spent fourteen years finding the lie inside a claim — the cut corner, the buried motive, the seam where a story stops holding. Selden should be no different: a fog-drowned timber town in the Pacific Northwest, a stalled development, two-point-three million dollars filed under "site defect." She came to prove fraud.
But Selden's founders didn't just log this forest. Three generations ago they made a bargain with something beneath it — a debt of offerings and observances, kept for sixty years, then abandoned as immigrant superstition. The town made itself forget what it owed.
The forest didn't.
As workers drift into the treeline wearing smiles that aren't quite their own, Dana realizes the missing person was never a cover story. The accidents aren't fraud. The claim is true. And the further she digs, the clearer it becomes that she wasn't sent to Selden by chance — she was called home, to a debt with her name already on it.
The Understory is atmospheric Pacific Northwest folk horror laced with cosmic dread — a generational bargain, a town built on forgetting, and a forest that collects what it is owed. For readers of T. Kingfisher, Catriona Ward, and Simone St. James.
- Series
- Something Remembers · No. 1