UNEATEN

Josie Pruitt is an emergency-room nurse in Charlotte who swore she would never go back to Kettle Gap, North Carolina, and never take the seat her family has kept since 1794. Then her grandmother Ada, the town’s last sin-eater, dies two minutes before midnight with the bread still on the plate beside her. Nobody ate it.

For sixty-five years Ada fed a thing that lives under the flat-topped ridge the town calls the Table. The Pruitt women call it the Satori. It feeds on hidden guilt. It knocks three times, wears the face of someone you wronged, and smells like curing tobacco. Now Ada lies uneaten, and until she is buried it walks the valley every night, stronger than the night before.

There is only one protection: say your secret out loud, the whole truth, to another living soul before it lays a hand on you. Sheriff Dale Ammons has kept the peace in this county for twenty years, and he has kept something of his own even longer. Josie has to choose: take her grandmother’s place at the table, or find a way to end the bargain for good.

A Southern Gothic horror novel about guilt, confession, and the small mountain towns that keep both.