Every October, the fog comes for the town.And every October, the town pays it what it asks.Maggie knows the rules. She has known them since she was a child.Keep the fire burning. Make the offerings. Do not ask what lives out in the mist.On a coast where every village from here to Nova Scotia has done this for longer than anyone can remember, the hollow season begins at sundown — and the Reverend says the darkness must be fed.Maggie wants to run.Take the skiff, row south along the coast past Portsmouth, get her sister Beatrice and little Thomas clear of this cursed shore before the season takes another soul.Three days, she pleads. Three days and they would be free of this whole haunted coast forever.But Beatrice only folds the spare shirts back into the satchel, careful as she has always been, and says the thing Maggie cannot forgive."The minister doesn't lie. He interprets."They will be seen, Beatrice warns. Caleb Marsh will notice the missing skiff. Widow Parsons watches the wharf. In a town like this, everyone notices everything — that is how they have survived this long.If survival is even what this is.Then the fog rolls in a full day early — breaking the oldest rule of all.Eight-year-old Thomas, who has always known when adults are lying, looks up from the too-big hearth fire and says the words that turn Maggie's blood to ice: "Caleb said the fire keeps things out. Things that live in the fog."Now the season has come for her family.There is a diary beneath the floorboards. A bone in the marsh. A child's dream that is not a dream.An empty feast laid out for a hungry dark. And a thing in the waves that wears a familiar face.The hunger has worn the mask of faith for generations, and the Reverend means to feed it again.To save her brother, Maggie must dig up everything this town buried — and decide whether some debts are meant to be paid, or finally, fatally refused.The Hollow Season is a chilling, atmospheric gothic horror novel about a family curse, a hungry darkness, small-town secrets, blood sacrifice, the dead that won't stay buried, and a sister who refuses to feed the fog.Perfect for readers who love folk horror, New England gothic, Shirley Jackson, slow-burn dread, cursed coastal towns, and stories where faith and monstrosity wear the same face.