In the summer of 1922, a boy walked into the timber south of Glendevey Lodge and did not come back. No body was found. No explanation was offered. The valley kept what it took.
Six years later, Joseph Backes purchased the land and built his ranch on the east bank of the Laramie River. His family has been returning every summer since 1928 - fishing the water, keeping the cattle, and documenting in careful notebooks passed generation to generation everything the valley has shown them. And everything it has taken.
RAWAH: The Wild Place is a multigenerational literary horror novel set in the Rawah Wilderness of northern Colorado, spanning more than four decades of one family's relationship with a valley that was never entirely theirs. The horror here is not sudden. It does not announce itself. It accumulates - in the notebooks, in the protocols the family develops without discussing why, in the things they do not say to each other across the dinner table at the end of a long summer day. In the ice cellar they do not open after dark. In the section of the upper pasture the cattle will not enter. In the sound outside Cabin Eight at two in the morning that the guests describe, always, the same way.
The Backes family has an arrangement with the valley. The arrangement has held for thirty years. But arrangements require two parties to honor them. Drawing on documented Arapaho history, the real geography of the Laramie River valley, and a family legacy rooted in northern Colorado, RAWAH is a novel about what it means to love a place that is not entirely safe - and to keep returning anyway.
It was here before the Arapaho came. It will be here after everything you love is gone. It already knows your children's names. For readers of Shirley Jackson, Paul Tremblay, and literary horror in the tradition of place-driven dread. Contains themes of child disappearance, generational trauma, and the supernatural.
