This summer, tourists aren't the only ones swarming the Smoky Mountains...
By the time Scarlett Sutton arrives at her dad’s cabin in the Smoky Mountains, two locals have already been eaten alive by wasps. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet. All Scarlett knows is her mom finally checked herself into a hospital to take care of her mental health, leaving Scarlett alone with her dad all summer.
After he insists that she get a job, Scarlett accepts a position at nearby Stovetop Outfitters, hoping to spend as much time away from him as possible. She doesn’t expect to trip over a skeletonized corpse beneath the zip-line during one of her shifts—and definitely doesn’t expect to be thrown into a Netflix-style true crime investigation.
The local sheriff’s department is so overwhelmed by these unsolved deaths that when one of the Stovetop Outfitters employees disappears next, Scarlett and her co-workers set out to find him on their own. They discover something much more horrifying: a swarm of yellow jackets stripping the meat off his body. Scarlett never signed up to solve a disgusting mystery, but in order to protect her friends and family, she must defeat the mountain’s darkness and all these godforsaken wasps.
​
Published by Clash Books in August, 2026
Adult Fiction | Horror, Coming-of-Age
One house. Five tangled lives.
One night, a spirit pounds on fourteen-year-old Becky’s bedroom door, calling her by name and demanding she come out. Having just survived the worst week of her life (spurred by the discovery of her name on a list of “Ugly Freshmen” in a bathroom stall at her high school), all she can do is collapse into the corner and cry, convinced that the dead have conspired with the living to hijack her safety and self-worth.
Becky doesn’t know Barbara, whose husband has been taken prisoner during World War II in the Pacific, or Lester, an unemployed loser who prefers MTV to social interaction, both of whom lived in her house well before she was born. She also doesn’t know Charles, who alienates the family he built the house for at the beginning of the century, or Preston, an unfulfilled civil servant who hosts concerts in the house’s basement, though they know her.
Spanning five points of view and time periods, Friday Night at Humble House tells the story of five wayward individuals and the house that gave them life. As Becky comes face to face with the souls that haunt her house’s past (both alive and deceased), she must summon the courage to reclaim control—of her identity, her dignity, her trajectory—or succumb to the tragedies of those who occupied the house before her.
​
Self-Published on July 16, 2024
Adult Fiction | Literary, Historical, Speculative