The Seven-Year Turn at Blackwood
A Folk Horror Novel

About this book:

The wind off the Panhandle doesn't blow—it scrapes. And every seventh year, the Blackwood farm demands its due: a crop sown in blood, tended with bone, and harvested from the dark furrows where something ancient waits beneath the hardpan. Silas Miller knows the rotation by heart; the cracking of his palm at the equinox is calendar enough. But this seventh year, the black plow has turned up more than wet, greasy soil—it's hooked a rib bone big as a man's thigh, warm after decades underground, and the boy carrying the seed bucket is burning with a fever that smells of copper and old tallow.

Martha remembers what happened to her brother the last time the turn came round. The neighbors in their painted houses look away when the wagons roll into town, their loaves staying soft for months, tasting faintly of iron. The county agent drives past the gate without stopping. Even the horses scream when harnessed to the black plow. Now the east field lies open and breathing, the ground heaving slow and deep where the share cut through that buried bone—and something in the dark rows is pushing up toward the light, fed by three generations of Miller blood and the terrible compact the deed requires.

Rooted in the dust-choked horror of the Dirty Thirties, *The Seven-Year Turn at Blackwood* is a masterwork of folk terror where the land itself is a hungry god, and the price of staying is measured in marrow. For readers who crave the ancestral dread of *Harvest Home*, the visceral rot of *The Ritual*, and the slow, grinding doom of *Children of the Corn*—this is the harvest you've been waiting for. The seventh year has begun. The red crop is rising.