The Fire Lookout's Liturgy
A Folk Horror Novel

About this book:

High in the Cascades, the Mount Silas lookout offers a panoramic view of a forest that doesn't burn—it *waits*. It's 1948, and Arthur Pym has traded the trenches of Europe for a seventy-four-step climb into a glass cage, armed only with a brass Osborne Firefinder and a government manual that reads less like protocol and more like prayer. When a thread of impossible white smoke rises straight up from a draw marked with a red-circled triangle, Arthur logs it as an anomaly. Ranger Gidley calls it a summons. The manual calls it liturgy.

As a dry front settles over the range and fuel moisture plummets to explosive lows, the radio crackles with reports from neighboring towers—smoke columns that vanish when cross-checked, coordinates that align with symbols no legend explains, observers who speak in flat voices about ground that breathes. The Forest Service was founded to keep the stove lid down, Gidley warns, but the blanket of timber is wearing thin. Something ancient stokes the fire below, and it knows the Watcher's name.

*The Fire Lookout's Liturgy* is a slow-burn folk horror novel where the true fuel isn't timber—it's belief, bureaucracy, and the cold mathematics of a landscape that has been burning since before the trees grew tall. For readers who love the atmospheric dread of *The Loney* or *The Ritual*, this is a masterclass in isolation horror: a story of smoke that doesn't drift, bearings that don't lie, and the terrible price of keeping watch when the forest decides it's time to collect its due.