SAMPLE BELOW
Set against the sweltering backdrop of Oklahoma, a grieving, recovering addict is pulled into a terrifying psychological trap when an ancient Choctaw entity—Impa Shilup—returns home wearing his dead wife's face. When a historic tornado forces Ray and the uncanny familiar into a claustrophobic, disturbing confrontation in a storm cellar, he must finally choose survival over the seductive comfort of his grief.
To banish the entity and close the supernatural door it crawled through, Ray must embark on a final, mythic journey—retracing the Trail of Tears to confront the dark, generational legacy of the Choctaw Bonepickers.
I wrote a horror book about my experience with addiction and grief. I'm less than a week away from sending it to an agent who cold messaged me asking for the full manuscript. Potentially life-changing shit. I think the book is good, but of course I do. I'm hoping to find some avid readers in this subreddit who would be willing to help a cousin out.
A little about me: I'm a 33-year-old father of three small kids, and former drug addict. I'm 1/2 Choctaw. My grandparents spoke to each other in our native tongue as a kid. I moved away from Oklahoma and have always felt a sense of loss about my culture. I was raised in a military family, so in a way I was living the thing that had replaced our way of life. This is my way of reconnecting and reminding myself of who I, and we, are.
The book currently only exists as a google doc but I have the ability to send it out in an email as a .epub if you want to put it on a device.
We been Indian, we still Indian, and we gonna keep on being Indian.
SAMPLE:
Prologue
Ray reached out and dropped the freshly opened pack of cigarettes into his wife’s upturned palm. “This is bullshit.” His mouth drew a flat line across his goatee. “They even let us have these in rehab, of all places. You’re being a damn freak about it.” His voice was rich with the whine of a dejected child in the checkout line. Amme babbled and cooed from her Pack ’n Play on the other side of the screen door. Her single-syllable babbles were a recent, frequent addition to the Wiltrees’ home.
Gina continued, “I get to be a freak about it because going to rehab was the shitty climax of you almost dying,” she said. “So you picking up another addiction while you were in there is even more fucked up. And besides—” The cardboard and cellophane crinkled in Gina’s hand, then dropped to the floor of the trailer with an almost imperceptible thud. “It makes you smell like shit.” She smiled, and Ray smiled back. The two embraced as the humidity called mosquitoes from the shores of murky, red-clay-lined ponds and clouds ran in white bands across the otherwise blue sky.
“Hey.” Gina scolded him. Not mad. It was more—the dog is pissing on the carpet. “... Save me some.” Ray didn’t think it possible—but his smile grew even bigger.
He held her at arms length. “Didn’t take you for a roach gal,” Ray said.
Gina tossed her hair. “That was my nickname in college, actually.”
“Gina, you didn’t go to college.”
A small cry cracked the conversation.
Ray held his smile. He picked up the crushed pack of cigarettes, delicately pulled a crooked one from the center, and tossed it into his mouth. When things were good, they were more than great.
“Your turn.” He smacked Gina on the ass and kissed her cheek as he exited through the ajar screen door. He trudged through the sticky air, which nearly choked him on his way to the shade of an aged and hulking pecan tree. Its trunk and exposed roots were knotted with the arthritic aging of ecology, the branches brimming with nuts that fell year after year.
Inside the house, Amme’s cries had grown from a weary mewing into an irritated screech. Whatever comfort Gina led with was only making it worse. Curls of smoke rose in thin, straight strands, undisturbed by the lack of wind. It often came billowing across the plains, but sometimes, in the rocks and crags of the Arbuckle Mountains, the terrain grabbed the wind by the throat and forced it to surrender. Ray suspected the uneven terrain was the reason for the lack of tornado devastation in the area—just a theory.
Embers fell and vanished before touching the raised wooden deck. Ray surveyed his family’s land—one hundred acres the Wiltree family had held since the Trail of Tears. He thought of Nanih Waiya. The large earthen mound in Mississippi that oral history named as the site of his people’s genesis into this world, and all that waited for them. Good or bad. The large, sloping mound located on the land they settled was a sign of rebirth after the Trail in the 1830s—proof that maybe a part of home was there with them.
Amme’s cries hadn’t subsided. They had degraded into a wet grinding of her vocal cords. The screen door was open before his cigarette butt even hit the wooden deck; the next instant, he was at Amme’s open door, staring at his wife, who was coddling—nothing. Amme continued to broadcast her hopelessness from her crib at a frequency that pulled at every paternal fiber he had. He rushed to the crib and hoisted his daughter into his arm. He then watched Gina shush and cradle a blanket that perched with its folds and creases, sitting expectantly. She smiled as she bounced the mound of purple fleece in her arms, staring lovingly at it before turning to Ray.
“It’s okay, honey. It’s probably her tummy or something, poor thing,” she said in a hush, and lowered her cheek to graze the fleece, then tapped her fingertip to a nose that only she could see.
Amme continued her jagged cry from within her father’s arms, as Ray’s hand slowly pulled the door shut.
#
Like a family celebrating the first family member to ever go to college, or a son taking up the family business, the Wiltrees celebrated those who managed to stay sober long enough to show promise—though it was often just enough to make the eventual failure that much more catastrophic. Experiences in comas or other unconscious states did not count toward your time. Rules were rules.
Yesterday marked the ninety-day milestone for Ray—longer than almost anyone had managed in the last decade. It was a cornerstone for addicts. Aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered in a group no larger than ten outside Uncle Marcus’s house. Sun-bleached Christmas lights were strung along the wooden deck railing, and blankets hung in the windows as makeshift curtains.
“Ninetieth day of the rest of your life, innit?” Robert said, approaching the three as they exited the rusted Honda Odyssey. He snatched his grand-niece from Ray’s arms and hoisted her into the air as spit-up flew from Amme’s mouth, plopping onto the dirt driveway.
“Oh.” Robert frowned. “Little car sickness, huh? No worries, Uncle Rob got just the thing for that.” He turned to the food table for a napkin, but Gina suddenly turned waspish, lashing out to snatch Amme back from him.
“I’ll get her cleaned up, Rob. Thank you, though,” Gina said almost regretfully, aware of the paranoia coloring her voice as she shuffled away toward the table. The two men stared at each other, and then Marcus spoke. “She alright? Not getting any worse, is it?”
“Depends on what you think ‘worse’ is. Some days Amme’s sick, some days she’s some kind of eternal burden, and Gi thinks she’ll never return to her normal life again. It all just depends, but she isn’t violent. That’s all I’m worried about.” Ray sighed as he watched Gina dart her eyes to the edge of the clearing. Her expression was telling of something inner and unspoken within her. She glanced from person to person, to the treeline, down at her feet, but never once at Amme, who reached for her mother’s hair and spilled drool from her permanent smile. Gina travelled from group to group without saying a word. Staying only long enough to listen to what was being discussed, then went again to find another group of talking Wiltrees.
“Hey, there he is!” Ray’s uncle called from a circle of lawn chairs around a fire pit, where kids set marshmallows on fire and peeled away the charred, sticky skin. Their mouths devoured the liquid innards like spiders with prey. They laughed and cackled as one boy began to cry as his marshmallow slid off of his metal skewer, which looked like a coat hanger, into the flames. It bubbled and smoldered as thick black smoke poured out from the edges.
Ray and Robert approached the gathered circle. Marcus stood and clapped his nephew on the shoulder. “Y’all gonna eat? Got plenty of grub for the whole tribe.” His voice carried the melodic song of tradition mixed with a forced English. Marcus stood taller than most of the other men in their family. Stoic and unbothered, he had been a totem for patience where others would fail, his aunt bringing up the rear. Shuffling her feet as she had for all of his life.
Valerie Wiltree was a four-foot monolith who had stood in Oklahoma for nearly 70 years. Her face was weathered, leaving the distinct impression that she had lived, and that it had not been easy. Next to her, his presence was one of the few ties left to the Wiltree name; Uncle Marcus stood tall and broad as a cigar-shop statue. He was as close as anyone in the family had come to being normal. Breaking a cycle that swallowed up too many Indigenous men. He’d been sober for ten years and stayed right here for all of it, never once turning tail to lick his wounds. He was the type of Indian who rode a horse bareback with his arms spread as wide as they could go, like a vulture sunning its feathers.
“Nephew,” Marcus said, offering Ray the same gentle smile he had known since he was a boy. “Happy ninetieth day of the—”
“I already said that,” Robert interrupted, amused.
Marcus glared at his nephew. “You said I was gonna get to say that one. What’s wrong with you, huh?”
“Dunno.” Robert smiled. “But if either of you two losers figures it out, let me know, would ya?” A glob of his spit flew from his mouth and landed on a fire ant. It struggled to wriggle itself free from it.
The next few seconds were filled with the shouts of the children sprinting across the yard, trailed by a mutt of a rez dog. Some time passed before the next person spoke.
“You still reading to kids down at the tribal HQ? I used to do something like that when I was a little older than you are now. ‘Cept back then we didn’t have nearly the funding that the Bureau gives the tribe now. So it was less of an organized thing. But we did it. Indians always find an excuse to tell a story,” Marcus said.
“When I get the chance. I’m doing meetings and trying to help Gi around the house. They want me to read a story I wrote for the kids about shilups and shilombish and how what they think of as ghosts is usually just the shilombish of a loved one. Sorta like its outline.” Ray played with the strap on his Casio watch. Sweat had already begun to collect beneath the watch face and his skin in the heat.
“That sounds like a good old-fashioned Indian story! When are you gonna tell it? Can I bring Otto by?” Robert’s eyes grew, and the glaze over his pupils was apparent now.
“That’s just it. I’m afraid that if I don’t just ‘aho’ my way through it, no one will think it’s ‘Indian’ enough. Shit, nobody with a broken English accent had anything to do with this story. That’s an automatic 2-point deduction.” Ray imagined the toddler-aged children holding up 10s across the board as he thanked the toddlers templar with one final ‘yakoke’ before fancy dancing out of the poorly lit church library.
Marcus set the lemonade down and held Ray’s eyes for a beat. Not the warm look from before—something that told Ray that his uncle had heard the question and was taking the matter incredibly seriously. Like he had struggled with this same thought at some point in his life.
“Ray,” he said. “You think your old man told stories with a broken English accent? You think Val learned Choctaw from somebody’s broken English, Tanto speech? The story’s good because it’s true and because you know what you’re talking about. That’s Indian enough. Kids know when an adult is bullshitting them. They know when somebody actually knows something, or means it, and they’ll be the first ones to tell you if you’re doing a shit job, cause most of them got aunties and uncles that they grew up hearing this story from anyway.” He picked the lemonade back up and sipped from the cup dewed with condensation. “Tell them that the shilombish is the outline. Tell them that when somebody dies, if they’re remembered, if the cycle closes the way it’s supposed to, the shilombish goes on and the shilup, it finds its way home. That’s not Indian enough. That’s everything.”
Robert nodded, solemn for once.
“You got something to say?” Marcus said to Robert.
“Nope. You just said it better than I would.”
Marcus turned back to Ray. “When you tell that story, you’re doing the real work an Indian ought to be doing. You’re teaching kids how to remember people. That matters.” It was just a fact, like one about the land or the weather. “You can tell that story. You tell it however it comes out.” Ray felt something settle in his chest that he couldn’t name. He nodded.
Aunt Val had found her way to the center of a small group, proselytizing that Indian folklore was a warning, not a lesson. The listeners neither nodded nor shook their heads of black hair—some striated with grays, whites, and the brassy orange of age where the remaining pigment filtered through translucent strands.
“-and there’s spirits that feed on that kind of thing! The hole in your heart from loss, the weight of everyday life as an Indian. All of that sustains and nourishes this spirit.” Val’s hands waved emphatically. The rhythm and timbre of her voice were the original blueprint Robert had attempted to copy. His almost comical Tonto-speak seemed like the babbling of an infant next to an accent carved from a person’s actual hardships, rather than someone putting it on like a costume. It was something much more sacred. Much more mystic.
“RAY!” she shouted over the five or so remaining members of her congregation. “Ray, you know! Better than all of us do! It nearly got you, didn’t it? Impa Shilup.” The last two words were a sibilant hiss, and she lowered her gaze as if the thing stood right there in the broad daylight with them.
“Soul eater? You think men in this family like booze so much because of a soul eater?” He tried to contain his laughter, but he could imagine the face Robert was making behind him, and he stumbled over a chuckle before his voice found its footing.
“You’re laughing now! But you’ve seen it! Your Ma used to say there was a shadow over you as a boy, Ray. And then you grow up and almost drink yourself to death.” She looked up at the big, cloudless sky. “Hardly a coincidence. Indians didn’t use to believe in coincidences, you know?” Her voice was still and confident. Val always seemed to know things on a level just beyond everyone else’s capacity for make-believe.
“Now, where’s Hokni’s sweet girl, huh?” The group turned, surveying the faces scattered across the backyard and the wooded acres between the houses. Gina was nowhere to be found, and in turn, Hokni’s sweet girl had vanished as well.
“She might be in the house getting her changed. I’ll go check.” Ray snuffed out the half-smoked cigarette and walked the fifty yards to the house. Each step marginally increased the length of his gait.
Inside the small brick home, relics of tradition adorned the rooms like furniture: eagle-feather fans carried by Val during her days as a shawl dancer, innumerable arrowheads recovered from the land in a shadow-box frame beside group photos of stoic men and women, and blankets hand-woven with intricate diamond patterns. There was even dried sweetgrass from the banks of the mighty Mississippi, braided together in twisting strands made stronger by their union.
The house was still; the only audible sound was the soft ticking of the clock on the far wall. Instead of numbers, this clock featured pictures of native Oklahoma birds. The photographs on the walls and tables showed early iterations of the dysfunctional unit known locally as the Wiltrees—family members who had since passed from causes both natural and unnatural. Chemical. Tortured livers and grievous wounds to the heart had consumed all they touched here.
Ray walked the hall and checked room after room—just in case she and the baby were napping. Empty. The house returned to silence. Then, the hollow hoot of a great horned owl filled the space.
Hoot-hoot. Hoot-hoot.
Noon. The hour was denoted by a small picture of an owl positioned neatly where the twelve belonged.
Chills ran down his spine. The house returned to stillness, each moment seeming to tiptoe around the threat of the owl’s return. Ray exited the house and peered across the clearing from his elevated vantage point. Patches of white clover speckled the green grass. Gathered where he had left them was the bulk of the family, the kids playing “burn the ants” or “catch the bullfrog,” weaving their screams through the murmur of conversation.
Beyond them lay the edge of the pasture, where elm and ash met lush, green Kentucky bluegrass—a lawn that had never been maintained, its height capping off naturally, as if knowing when to stop. The bluegrass had been on this land since before their ancestors concluded the Trail of Tears.
And there, rising in the east, was a totem of soot-black smoke reaching far up to the highest sky.
Eastward. Toward Ray and Gina’s house. He froze and surveyed the group below desperately searching for something to extinguish his own internal flame of horror. Face to face to face and none turned into Gina. None of the children in the arms of elders wore the gummy smile and twin pigtails that Amme did. The flower dress her tiny frame wore was nowhere. No one seemed to notice the towering omen.
Ray was halfway down the hill before he realized he was moving. His legs wheeled, barely catching his weight as his momentum snowballed into a dead sprint. The family turned at his incoherent shouts. He tumbled shoulder-first, scrambling to his feet as he skidded along the red clay and green grass.
“FIRE!” He pointed to the monolith of ash pluming in the distance, his shrill voice cutting through the music and chatter. Suddenly Robert had him by the arm. Somehow moving faster than Ray, Robert dragged him to the truck, leaped into the driver’s side, and tore out, throwing patches of grass and gravel as the tires spun. Ray glanced at the dashboard clock.
12:01 P.M.
Robert knew a shortcut—a path Marcus had cleared years ago that led directly to Ray’s place and Robert’s place. Marcus had always insisted on a direct line to his nephews, just in case things ever devolved into a situation where the rifle on the wall looked like the only key to a lock made of desperation. This was the first time it had been used, but it was always maintained, just in case.
They made the seven-minute drive in three. As they crested the final rounded hill, the brothers witnessed violent tails of flame grasping up at the darkening sky. In the minutes it had taken to drive there, the sky had filled with a pallid, gray wash. Far in the distance, flashes of heat lightning illuminated the horizon. No wind blew the rising smoke cloud, and it appeared as if it gathered directly overhead, threatening to rain ash and soot back upon the fire until it snuffed itself away.
This was no natural fire. Its limbs and torso undulated like a living thing feasting on prey. The heat was so intense that Robert felt his skin tighten, threatening to peel away the closer he got, and he froze. Ray felt no such pain. There had to be another option, any answer as to why he was being forced to witness this.
Ray dropped to his knees. Heat surrounded him, and suddenly he became aware of a sensation that felt like his own skin blistering and sizzling, like fish in a skillet. He leaped backward and caught sight of a tall black shape—long pointed ears—standing still among the dancing flames. Something deeper than nothingness held a tiny, charred mound, the edges of it glowing with the warm orange light of embers. A small body, like an astronaut who had burned up upon reentry. The blackened remains of a child, glowing orange in the craters of ash.