Devil's Creek

By: Todd Keisling

Narrated by: Danny Campbell

About 15 miles west of Stauford, Kentucky, lies Devil's Creek. According to local legend, there used to be a church out there, home to the Lord's Church of Holy Voices - a death cult where Jacob Masters preached the gospel of a nameless god.

And like most legends, there's truth buried among the roots and bones.

In 1983, the church burned to the ground following a mass suicide. Among the survivors were Jacob's six children and their grandparents, who banded together to defy their former minister. Dubbed the "Stauford Six," these children grew up amid scrutiny and ridicule, but their infamy has faded over the last 30 years.

Now their ordeal is all but forgotten, and Jacob Masters is nothing more than a scary story told around campfires.

For Jack Tremly, one of the Six, memories of that fateful night have fueled a successful art career - and a lifetime of nightmares. When his grandmother Imogene dies, Jack returns to Stauford to settle her estate. What he finds waiting for him are secrets Imogene kept in his youth, secrets about his father and the church. Secrets that can no longer stay buried.

Contains mature themes.

©2020 Todd Keisling (P)2021 Tantor

Small Town life meets Big Time Horror

This book was wonderfully told. I hope this is taken as a compliment, but I felt like I was reading a classical Stephen King book. You had the small town with a lot of POVs from different characters, an unearthly creature haunting the town, and a group of people coming together to stop it.
This book deserves a whole lot of praise, and I will be reading more by Todd Keisling.

Great job!

Excellent piece of folk horror paired with cosmic horro

If you like weird cults devoted to nameless gods, creepy folk horror monsters with black worms pouring from their bodies, and mind rending cosmic horror devouring reality around you, you will love this book.

That Old Time Religion

After reading Scanlines by Todd Keisling, the bar was set quite high. Devil’s Creek absolutely did not disappoint.

Old-time religion never seems quite as horrific and awful as it does in stories of small, backwoods towns, and Keisling captures that magnificently with this story. Decades ago, a twisted minister, Jacob Masters, preached an unholy gospel of sacrifice and cruelty, turning members of families against one another as he sewed his seeds within the flock. Six children he fathered were rescued by their disillusioned grandparents, who were far too late to save their own children…just before the church went up in flames and its congregation went to a mass grave.

In the present day, we revisit the town of Stauford, Kentucky as Jack reluctantly returns home to handle the estate of the grandmother who saved him from the cult Masters had built. But old wounds aren’t as healed as they might have seemed, and something troubling seems to be stirring at Devil’s Creek.

What Jack finds instead of closure, are secrets that threaten to shatter not only his sanity but the world around him. As Jack’s nightmares become a reality, he and his half-siblings are forced to take sides and take a stand against a nameless horror that waits beneath the unhallowed ground where the old church once stood.

The story Keisling weaves is a compelling one, and he further displays his knack for crafting something that gets under the skin and sticks with the reader long after the end.

Danny Campbell provided excellent narration for the audiobook edition of the novel and made it easy to follow the cast of characters as they descend into the pits of a nightmarish hell on earth.

calling1

Very good! This was a long book, and i was nervous to start it because i though it would take forever .i heart it was a slow burn, but that did not cross my mind as i listen this its first chapter pulled me in with a religious cult and six poor children and it kept me hooked

Awesome hidden cosmic horror

I came for the creepy cult and stayed for the Lovecraftian indifferent universe! Even had a bonus Miskatonic U mention!