Newcomer Jonah Hale returns to Kettlebridge to write a quiet story about home — and finds children teaching a machine how to ask for attention.

Jonah thought the town’s worst was gossip and old grudges. He did not expect a thing made at a shuttered 1990s lab — braided wire braided with tissue, warm as a hand — to surface among children’s rituals and teach them a cruel economy of care. The Hollowed Tether is a visceral, atmospheric novel of small-town dread where scientific curiosity becomes a predator and childhood bargains with blood and meaning.

Set in the fog-laced rhythms of rural America, this psychological horror blends unsettling domestic detail with a science-gone-wrong dread: a prototype meant to heal becomes a teacher of dangerous wants. Jonah must face his own appetite for being seen while the town fractures into protectors, profiteers, and deniers — and a wrenching choice forces the community to decide whether to erase memory to save lives.

If you like slow-burn, deeply psychological dread — novels where atmosphere, moral trade-offs, and human cost drive the terror — The Hollowed Tether will keep you looking over your shoulder long after the final tick.

Listen it if you want:

• Psychological, small-town horror that focuses on character and escalation.

• A science-gone-wrong premise (biological + synthetic) that feels domestic and intimate.

• Moral ambiguity, visceral scenes, and a slow, relentless pull toward a life-or-memory climax.

Click BUY to descend into Kettlebridge — and try not to answer.