For lovers of Stephen Graham Jones, Jeff VanderMeer, and Nick Cutter, Willow Rose is a compulsively readable, literary ode to the terror of the unknown that comes for all of us in the depths of night.

A knock on the cabin door on indigenous land in the wintry woods of Minnesota.

Tap tap tap.

Driving down the boreal roads of rural Minnesota to his one-room cabin after a long ER shift, Dr. Alder’s eyes snap open, his old Civic screaming to a stop in front of a massive bull elk, its head tilting back unnaturally, its maw open. Comet Goodwin, the closest comet to Earth in history, lights up the sky in an otherworldly greenish tint with its long, jagged tail of fire.

Tap tap tap.

Alder’s world ignites in a blinding white flash. The car windows shatter inward. The elk is gone.

If he can get the car started again and get back to his cabin, maybe he can make sense of all this…but first he must survive the frozen silence of the night and the evil that stalks within it.

We must stay together always.