The redwoods of northern California remember every cut. In Allison Mick's debut novel, a nurse comes home to a logging town where something in the forest has started cutting back.

Readical Key Points

• A debut horror novel set in a logging town in the redwood country of northern California
• Ecohorror with a streak of dark comedy, pitting a search party against bark-skinned creatures in the old-growth woods
• Content note: depicts suicidal depression, a family history that includes a lynching, and graphic violence
• Starred review from Booklist
• Hardcover, 352 pages, Erewhon Books, 2026

Jasmine Bay is a psychiatric nurse in Oakland who has kept everyone at arm's length, including her brother James and James's wife, Tilly, formerly her closest friend. The death of her godmother brings her back to the town she left, where loggers are reporting monsters among the trees and her own family's past is knotted into the long fight over the forest. When James walks into the woods and doesn't come back, Jas leads the search.

Mick sets horror and humor side by side and uses both to ask what clear-cutting has cost the people who live beside the stumps. The book suits readers of ecological horror, weird fiction and stories in which grief and the uncanny share a house. The trees were here first. The novel lets them keep count.

About the Author

Allison Mick is a comedian, voice actor and visual artist who trained on the San Francisco and Oakland stand-up circuit. Her writing has appeared in The Hard Times and Reductress.

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