The Deep Well Quill Tree Press Fall 2024

My next novel, The Deep Well, is a YA horror based on the Kola Superdeep borehole urban legend.

When five-year-old April Fischer heard a strange voice coming from the bottom of a superdeep borehole, it triggered a massacre. Among  the victims of the massacre was April’s foreman dad, but his body was never found.

Urban legend has it that the massacre was a blood sacrifice made by the mysterious Deep Well cult to open a portal to another dimension. It doesn’t help when the terrible movie based on her life called Hellhole! suggests that a demon-possessed April opened the portal on the day of the massacre.  After that, only April’s best friend, the skeptical, acerbic Grace stood by her.

Almost twelve years later, an online group of Deep Well cultists are convinced that the voice told April to open a portal to another dimension— and she needs to come back to the drill site on her seventeenth birthday to finish the job. 

Nothing could bring April back until documents from the drill site convince her that her dad is on the other side of the portal— and that he's still alive. Aided by Grace, Zach, who lost his uncle in the massacre, and Slater, a mysterious newcomer with motives of his own, April searches for the truth about what happened that day with the hope of bringing her dad back home.

But the clock is ticking down towards her birthday, and the cultists need another sacrifice.