A MACABRE THRILLER For Those Who Love POE, Clive BARKER, and The TWILIGHT ZONE.

Purisima Concepción Mission
Tejás 1716

“Despelleja los diablos rojos vivos!” cried Guarco.

More soldiers ran past the Spanish jailer as he cheered them on.

“Skin the red devils alive, I say! And may God damn them to hell!”

Roaring with laughter, Guarco forced the jail door shut against the whiplash wind and secured it. With the intense heat of the day colliding with the cold of this evening tempest, hail and worse would soon follow. Pulling a torch from its hammered sconce, he made his way from the jail’s anteroom and down its unlit corridor to look in on his newest prisoner, Brezo. She did not lift her chin from her chest.

“Witch!” he growled. “You hurt my friend. You let him kiss and kiss and kiss, and you ate his tongue. You chewed out his eyes while he choked on his own blood. Y-you, you-ou––”

Brezo moved so quickly Guarco did not even see her head jerk or shudder, let alone rise, her upturned eyes so intense, the whites so bared, it looked as if two hard-boiled eggs had been set into her sockets. And, for the first time in his life, Guarco the jailer felt he had become the prisoner.

So begins Heather’s Treehouse, a tale sprigging from the brutal black magic of Native American witchcraft, vengeance, and the savage, merciless end of things in the Old World, gone to seed in 1716 and burgeoning 272 years later in the far more modern world of 1988, Edgewood, Texas. On the outskirts of this sleepy little town, the purest form of evil has been nurtured by the blood and somatic fluids of centuries of slaughter and simmering hatred, gestating within a morbidly gnarled black oak named Heather’s Treehouse by fifteen-year-old, aspiring author Matley Joe Roberts.

For Matley, Sheriff R. J. Whittaker, and the elderly Tawakoni Indian, Pappy Sobs, the horrific and grisly fight to save Edgewood is a fight not only to save their home and its unsuspecting populace, but also their own souls and the higher ideals of humanity. It is a reckoning that quickly escalates into the first battle in a timeless war of tribalism versus individualism, ensconced identity-fueled vengeance versus commonsense and reason, the inevitable result an epic total-war ruin that could threaten all of mankind if allowed to flourish and spread beyond the borders of Edgewood.

“And that,” says the ever-wise Pappy Sobs to young Matley, “is why we fight. ‘Cause the very Devil himself might run this world, but he still doesn’t own it. Not as long as we never, ever, ever lie down.”