Sam Everett never expected to find himself in a small southern town surrounded by a living cemetery. After his wife’s sudden death, he was desperate to get away from the big city and all those memories, and Maylene’s Hollow seemed like the place to go.
But the Hollow has a dark secret. The town won’t allow their dead to rest. They are forced to wander for hundreds of years. Now the denizens of the woods have had enough.
Helped by a mysterious widow … who might also be a murderer, the town’s matriarch with powers of her own, and a crotchety giant who thinks the dead have a right to rebel, Sam needs to learn how to let go of the dead to truly live.
Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it’s allowed to rest …
Why we’re excited about this book:
When it comes to blending horror with other genres in wild and unexpected ways, Brennan LaFaro delivers the goods. The author of Noose, Last Stay, Song Dogs, the Slattery Falls trilogy, and the story collection Illusions of Isolation, LaFaro’s short fiction has graced the pages of such publications as Dark Disasters: A Dark Dozen Anthology, Hot Iron and Cold Blood: An Anthology of the Weird West, Inside the Indie Horror World, Blood in the Soil, Terror on the Wind, and Shiver to name a few. With his latest, LaFaro presents readers with a grief-stricken man running from his past to a town that refuses to let the dead move on. Clay McLeod Chapman (Wake Up and Opwen Your Eyes) says: “The Denizens destroys you from the get-go, then has the audacity to resuscitate you with a simple flip of the page. LaFaro has the uncanny knack to equally decimate and resurrect his readers, chapter after chapter, a grief-stricken Prometheus, weighing his writing down with an ache that just keeps us coming back for more.”, and Christa Carmen (How to Fake a Haunting) says: “Brennan LaFaro builds dread with the best of them, and The Denizens is a creeping and macabre passage through grief and regret, terror and devotion, hope and pain. What lurks on the outskirts of Maylene’s Hollow will come for you no matter how prepared you think you might be.”
Releasing from Nefarious Bat Press 17 February 2026, The Denizens by Brennan LaFaro is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA