The Reclamation · Book One
Overburden
An Appalachian Gothic cryptid romance about a land surveyor, an unstable coal site, and the old intelligence answering from inside the mountain.
Official book guide
What is Overburden about?
A technically gifted surveyor returns to the West Virginia coal hollow she escaped to map an unstable reclamation site. Her instruments work exactly as designed. The mountain answers anyway.
Overburden makes competence part of the courtship: water tables, survey lines, damaged infrastructure, and practical repair become a language between the heroine and a presence older than extraction. The result is a slow-burn cryptid romance grounded in Appalachian Gothic and ecological horror.
People and creatures
Ivy Sturgill is a licensed human land surveyor returning to her West Virginia home. The mountain’s watchers are Early, the immense white creature working the spoil; Amos, a moth-winged being whose evenings do not run in ordinary order; Tally, the pale watcher who counts the miners; and Whistler, a woman whose shape is entangled with the stories told about her.
World and setting
The Vane and Sang Mountain in fictional Aldervane County, West Virginia, in 2026–27. A damaged coal landscape carries the history of the invented 1966 No. 6 mine disaster.
What’s at stake
Ivy’s reclamation work brings her up against a planned permanent mine closure, unanswered signals underground, and her own family’s disappearances. Protecting evidence also means protecting the living landscape.
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