In the summer of 1956, the quiet Tennessee county of Redwood Vale begins to rot from the inside out. An unexplained illness spreads through the high school first-students collapsing in hallways, coughing scarlet threads, whispering strange phrases in dead languages no one recognizes. At Redwood Vale High, the yearbook committee becomes the final witnesses to the world before it dies. Seventeen-year-old Evelyn "Eve" Mercer, a shy, brilliant student with an obsession for philosophy and Eastern cultivation tales, starts noticing impossible things: - classmates glowing faintly beneath their skin - shadows moving against the light - pages in the yearbook changing by themselves - teachers speaking in voices that aren't theirs As the sickness tears through the county, the outside world seals Redwood Vale in. Power lines fall. Roads are blocked. Radios chant warnings that twist midway into occult sermons. The teens realize the illness is not biological alone-it's spiritual, ritualistic, and hungry. Their only hope lies in decoding the symbols that appear in the yearbook margins every day, symbols linked to a forgotten Xianxia-style cultivation practice buried beneath Appalachian folklore. But every revelation drags them deeper into psychological horror, unraveling their sense of reality. As Redwood Vale collapses into a post-apocalyptic nightmare, Eve and her friends must navigate dark academia secrets, apocalyptic landscapes, and supernatural trials-and confront the truth that the illness isn't killing them...

Bronwyn Larson has spent her whole life not depending on her mother, a constantly recovering addict, until the moment her life was literally torn apart when an EF4 tornado ripped through their trailer park and her mom is found dead, miles away after the storm. Suddenly, her estranged father is a part of her life, a prominent state senator who's been absent since Bronwyn was born, a product of her parents' secretive affair. After living alone with her mother in a trailer for seventeen years, Bronwyn now has a stepmother and four new siblings, including an older brother and sister who seem skeptical, if not actually disproving, of Bronwyn living with them. While staying with them in their vacation lake house an hour away from what she called home, Bronwyn is hit with the bombshell that her mother's death is being treated as suspicious, with injuries inconsistent of being killed during the tornado. Estranged from everyone she knows, except her estranged new family, Bronwyn doesn't know who trust or who to believe about her mother's death. Torn between her life as the daughter of a single drug addict and the middle child of a well-respected senator, all while learning more about the mother she thought she knew, Bronwyn is forced to navigate through this new unfamiliar life alone, with this gut feeling she has. That her mother's killer isn't unfamiliar. 𝐓𝐎 𝐁𝐄 𝐏𝐔𝐁𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐃 𝐌𝐀𝐘 18th 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟏 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐏𝐀𝐃 𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒 Cover designed by Ashley Bandy