Press Kit

Some stories don’t come easy. They rise slow, like fog out of a hollow before daylight, carrying the smell of rain, woodsmoke, old grief—and the unsettling knowledge that not every mystery stays buried in folklore; some find their way into laboratories, government files, and the quiet places where science reaches toward the unseen. 

Where the Mountain Sings grew from my love of mountain towns, family stories, old warnings, and places that seem to remember every footstep ever taken across them. Everville may be fictional, but the feelings that built it are real: grief that settles deep, love that lingers after loss, and the kind of courage a person finds only after everything familiar begins to fall apart.

In the mountains, stories have always meant more than entertainment. They are warnings, prayers, and truths passed down by people who knew better than to laugh at shadows moving in the tree line. I wanted this book to carry that feeling—the sense that the land has a voice, that blood remembers, and that the past is never as buried as folks pretend.

Some of the story also grew from the strange, documented places where science and the unseen have crossed paths. During the Cold War, programs like Project Stargate tried to make instruments of intuition—to train the human mind to reach past walls, distance, and ordinary knowing. That history unsettled me in the best way. It reminded me that mystery does not always live in graveyards and old stories. Sometimes it wears a government badge, hums beneath fluorescent lights, and gets locked away in files marked classified. They weren't necessarily looking for magic in the way a fantasy novel would describe it, but they were absolutely looking for a way to weaponize the human mind to bypass physical barriers, which led them to some very dark and ancient-feeling places.

Fox Ridge is fiction, but the fear beneath it is not: that we are forever digging into the dark, naming what we find, measuring it, weaponizing it—and forgetting that some things beneath the earth may have names of their own.

And then there is Sunny.

From the moment he trotted into Deneen’s life, muddy and golden and somehow certain of where he belonged, Sunny became more than a dog on the page. He became a promise: a warm body in the dark, a steady presence when fear pressed too close, and a simple kind of light that says, you are not alone, not while I’m beside you.

For anyone who has ever been loved by an animal, you know that devotion can feel almost holy. They find us when we are cracked open. They sit with us in silence. Sunny’s bond with Deneen grew from that truth: sometimes healing does not arrive with answers. Sometimes it arrives on four paws, lays its head in your lap, and stays.

I also want to give thanks to every animal who has ever found their way into my life—though dogs have always seemed to find me most. Long before “rescue” became a word folks said with hashtags, adoption posts, and neat little labels, I was taking in animals because some creature needed a soft place to land, and my heart never learned how to turn away.

Over the years, I have loved dogs who came to me scared, stubborn, wounded, wild-hearted, gentle, half-broken, and impossibly brave—and more than a few other souls besides. They arrived carrying stories in their bones and left pieces of healing in mine. Each one taught me something about trust, patience, loyalty, forgiveness, and the kind of love that asks for so little and gives everything in return.

Sometimes I wonder if animals like them exist because we need them—or if our need for them is what calls them into being. Maybe it is both. Maybe the lost find the lost. Maybe rescue has never belonged to just one side of the door.

Deneen’s journey is full of darkness, fear, and old secrets clawing their way into the light. But beneath all of that, this is a story about love: love for family, for home, and for the people and animals who stand beside us when the world turns strange.

Thank you for walking into Everville with me—for following its haunted roads, listening to its old stories, and trusting the mountain when it started to sing. I hope, somewhere in all the shadows, you found a little light. And I hope when you closed the book, it stayed with you like an old song drifting through the trees—with Sunny still keeping watch at the edge of the dark.

And if Sunny could speak beyond the quiet language of eyes, paws, and loyalty, I think he would tell you:

 I came out of the dark to find her. I stayed to help her find the light. But she saved me, too.

Research Note: Project Stargate and other Cold War-era investigations into remote viewing and anomalous cognition helped inspire the fictional science-and-secrecy elements of Fox Ridge. For further reading, see declassified Project Stargate materials and Annie Jacobsen’s Phenomena.