The Pit: An Appalachian Horror Novel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798193958000)

Something drug their deer into the water.

Cooch Blankenship has a wife, a baby daughter, and a job at the Dollar General that doesn't cover a McDowell County winter.

So on Friday nights he goes out with Harley Maynard and Dale Sizemore to spotlight deer on the reclaimed strip mine above Marley Fork. It's illegal. It's also how his family eats through February.

In October 2007 they shoot a doe across an open field. Before they can reach her, something drags her down the slope and into a hole full of black water. The water goes still. Then, from underneath, comes a sound like chewing.

Three weeks later Tom Mercer, a retired botany professor, walks out to that same pit to collect plant samples and doesn't come back. His boot prints stop twenty feet from the water.

Three men know why. All three would have to admit to a felony to warn anyone else.

So they keep quiet. The thing in the water doesn't. It learns the sound of their trucks. It gets into their sleep. It starts turning up closer to home.

One of them stops wanting to stay away.

The Pit is the first Wallace Cole novel of Appalachian horror - a story about a poor county, a hole full of still water, and the arithmetic of keeping quiet.