I Tried to Save My Sister in the Appalachian Woods, but It Was Already Too Late
Set over Thanksgiving weekend in the Tennessee mountains, the story follows a recovering addict named Ky who takes his teenage half-sister, Harper, and friends on a camping trip that goes terrifyingly wrong when a parasitic, reality-warping entity begins infecting their group one by one. After Harper and Noah are hideously consumed from the inside out by writhing worm-like anomalies that trigger agony-inducing, hive-mind screeches, Ky's friends and family turn on him, with Mellie falsely claiming he hallucinated the horrors due to a relapse. Disbelieved by the local police and rejected by his mother for being "crazy" rather than just a drug addict, Ky escapes back toward Chattanooga with only Harper's dog, Feral, left by his side—now paralyzed by the lingering, agonizing terror of whether the dog is also infected and what will happen to him next.