Some holes don't swallow. They hunger. When Roy Teague comes home to his family's ragged mountain with nothing but debt and the ghost of a wedding ring, he thinks the bottomless pit at the tree line is just another place to unload what the world doesn't want. His people fed it junk and secrets for a hundred years, and taught their children not to answer when it spoke. Roy never learned the rules. He learns the voice, though. The first time it rises out of the dark in his late wife's laugh, he drops to his knees and begs for one more word. The hole is happy to give.

Only Winnie Swimmer, a Cherokee woman who keeps the old ways close as a blade, knows what that voice costs. The Hungry Ground does not return the dead. It wears them. As Roy and Winnie try to stitch shut a threshold that feeds on grief, the mountain gathers its teeth, the voices sweeten, and the door pushes against its hinges. A folk horror of love and rot, where inheritance is a curse and grief is a currency, for readers of Stephen Graham Jones and Alma Katsu.