Pig

A Supernatural Thriller

By: Nancy Williams

Narrated by: Jan Flesher

Meadville, Pennsylvania is a small college town nestled at the foot of a strange little mountain called Round Top. Some call it Pig Mountain.

Legend has it that a sinister race of people live up there: the Pig People of Round Top, strange and dangerous mutants that steal women. Women have been disappearing from town for years, gone without a trace. Some are convinced it’s The Pig People, taking the women to breed. Nobody really knows. But the town is on edge, gone fearful of the night.

Carrie Owens has heard the story, but doesn’t believe it. She knows terror has other faces, for she volunteers at the local battered women’s shelter. She doesn’t give credence to the boogeyman. Until one night it becomes her reality.

PIG is a poignant story of obsession, love, and the terrible consequences of what happens when reality and fantasy blur. It is a tale of the remarkable power of the mind and how it will do anything to protect itself.

©2020 Hellbender Books (P)2026 Beacon Audiobooks

Worthy of praise

Pig starts as a regional urban legend—the pig people of Round Top, or Pig Hill, and the women who have gone missing from Meadville for years—and turns into something quiet and disturbing. At no point does Nancy Williams rush the monster. The horror creeps in through streets, woods, and local rumors until the line between what the town believes and what the characters can actually bear starts to dissolve.

What carries it is the character work. Carrie and the people around her feel damaged in specific, believable ways rather than sketched in to serve a scare. Williams is especially good at people whose sense of reality has already been bent by trauma, obsession, and the need to protect themselves. The dread builds in the gaps: what they won’t say, what they misremember, what they keep returning to. Some of the strongest passages aren’t frightening so much as unsettling, and the twists land because the people and their actions have been earned.

That slow, eerie climb is also why the book feels built for adaptation. The legend gives it a visual hook, but the real material is in the interior—memory, sexuality, abuse, and a mind that rewrites what it cannot face. It’s less a question of whether pig people live on the mountain than of what happens when the monsters inside become impossible to separate from the ones outside. It’s easy to see why the story moved to the screen as Pig Hill; the novel already reads like something you watch with the lights low (but not too low).

I’d recommend Pig to anyone who wants psychological horror with an atmospheric, increasingly uneasy tone rather than a straight monster story.