The Listening Dark cover — a white fox stands on a dark road beneath a sign reading Hiller's Crest
Book Two · The Bernard County Series

It doesn't hunt. It listens — for every gap you left unguarded.

The ground cries out. The Hollows answer.

Some debts don’t stay buried. They just wait for the harvest.

Some towns don’t haunt you.
They collect.

Hiller’s Crest doesn’t have a ghost problem. It has an arrangement — older than the road signs, patient as ridge soil, and owed. Every unlived dream, every broken vow, every name left unclaimed becomes a debt the ground remembers.

When Noah comes home, he doesn’t know he’s walking back into the contract his family signed generations ago. He only knows the dark is listening, and it already knows his name.

The one thing it can’t touch, can’t invert, can’t collect on — is love that’s freely given. Which is exactly why it wants what he and Riley have.

From the Rule Book — Hiller’s Crest
Let not the dirt of the Hollows touch the relics of the blood. — unbroken, for generations
Let not the dirt of the Hollows touch the relics of the blood. — broken. the ground noticed.
Speak no name the Hollow has not freely given.
What is loved freely cannot be inverted, claimed, or owed.

“Some of my characters fall in love. Some of them don’t make it to sunrise. Sometimes both.”

The Dark Is Already Listening

Folk horror. A love that won’t invert. A town that keeps its receipts.

Free in Kindle Unlimited
The Listening Dark · Bernard County Series, Book Two · Kevin W. McKee