Today, horror blog Night Worms published the cover reveal for my cult horror novel THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, coming November 2020 from Hachette Book Group.

David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group’s horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind.

When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night?

The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.

Night Worms invited me to offer some comments about the cover. Here they are:

I worked with Lisa Marie Pompilio on the cover of Orbit’s OUR WAR, a novel about a modern civil war in America, and was absolutely blown away by the final product. When I heard I’d be working with her again on the upcoming release of THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, I was very excited. She didn’t disappoint. The cover portrays wilderness, which is on the nose in terms of where a fair portion of the novel takes place but also figurative of mystery, the past, and a spiritual journey from pain to truth. The upside-down world, dead trees, and trailing sliver of blood screams corruption, danger, and tragedy. What is hiding there? What is the price of finding out?

THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK is about the human search for meaning and the dark side of finding it. In the novel, a group of adults reunite to confront the childhood years they spent in a religious community that degenerated into a violent cult. Tragedy broke them apart and will bring them back together to ask the questions: What really happened that last horrible night in the wilderness at the base of Red Peak? What waits for them on its summit? To find out, they will have to journey across a different kind of wilderness of time and trauma and return to make the same ultimate choice that faced their parents long ago.

Stay tuned!