When the mountain starts keeping score, it never stops at one life.

Briar Gap, West Virginia, was already dying before the earth began to shake. The coal jobs left, the young people followed, and all that remained were empty houses, bad memories, and the dark bulk of Kithlow Ridge leaning over the town like a warning.

Eben Locke swore he’d never come back. But his kid brother dies in a “work accident” on the ridge, and the official story doesn’t match the tremors in the ground or the stone dust in the coffin. Coming home means facing the town that chewed him up, the mining company that owns what’s left—and something older that’s waking inside the rock.

Something that wears the mountain like armor.

Something that counts every broken promise in stone.

As landslides cut off the roads and people are swallowed into solid walls without a drop of blood, Eben teams with Nora, his stubborn, sharp-eyed niece, a burnt-out inspector, and the town’s last historian to uncover an old pact made with a “warden of the ridge.” Generations ago, the miners promised never to cut past a certain seam. The company broke that promise. Now the debt is due.

To save anyone, Eben has to go under the ridge, into a buried chamber of petrified bodies and carved symbols, and make a choice: help the mountain demon balance its ledger…or break Kithlow Ridge itself and bury them both.

WHAT THE MOUNTAIN KEEPS is a slow-burn, Appalachian backwoods horror novel about family, guilt, and an ancient stone-coated thing that moves through rock like water and never forgets who owes it a life.

Perfect for those who love:

• Small-town supernatural horror with teeth
• Occult, creature-based dread rooted in real-world mining lore
• Stories where the land itself becomes the monster

If you’ve ever looked at a dark ridgeline at night and felt it looking back, this book is for you.