About the Book

It started with a walking stick given to me in a casual gesture of generosity: the craftsman simply wanted to make room in his garage. And then something rare and, for a fiction writer, beautiful happened: I ‘saw’ a story. The king of seeing with the mind’s eye, the creative eye, the magical eye, that had me writing short stories in spiral notebooks when I was a child.

Devil’s Wood didn’t so much arrive as it emerged. It came the way the glyphs come to Peter Brightly in the story—bit by bit, carving by carving, revealing itself only as far as it chose to. I’d finish a chapter and another would surface, as if it had been waiting in the wood the whole time and I was only the one holding the carver’s knife.

I’m not sure I started this book so much as it started with me. And like the characters who find themselves bound to the Devil’s Wood curse, I’ve come to understand there’s no putting it down until I’ve written the last page for the reader to turn.

About Devil’s Wood

There is a tree older than memory growing at the edge of an unremarkable stretch of forest — a chestnut oak that has stood for two thousand years, and that, according to the people who know to fear it, has never once stopped feeding. Devil’s Wood begins with the discovery of what that feeding leaves behind: a young boy named Matthew, exploring the woods the way boys always have, uncovers skeletal remains half-buried in the earth alongside something far stranger — a walking stick, carved with unsettling precision from a limb of the tree itself. What he doesn’t know, and what the rest of the novel slowly reveals, is that the object he’s just pulled out of the ground has been waiting a very long time for someone to find it.

The story moves on two parallel tracks that gradually close in on each other. In the present day, Peter Brightly — an antique dealer working out of Lambertville, New Jersey — is drawn into the walking stick’s orbit by way of a mysterious estate auction, the kind of small-town sale where objects with quiet, terrible histories tend to resurface. Peter deals in the past for a living; he’s spent years handling things other people discarded, trusting that objects are just objects. Devil’s Wood is the story of him discovering how wrong that assumption can be, as the disturbances around him escalate from unsettling to undeniable.

Running underneath both threads is the novel’s central mythology: the legend of the Devil’s Tree and the so-called People of the Tree, and at the center of it, an antagonist named Benjamin Delacorte — centuries-old, sustained across generations by draining the life of whoever comes to possess the carved stick. Delacorte isn’t a ghost in the traditional sense, and he isn’t confined to one body or one name; the novel plays with identity and inheritance in ways that make him feel less like a single villain and more like a slow-moving inevitability, something that has simply always been there, waiting its turn.

Lambertville itself does real work in this book. It’s a small, historic river town on the New Jersey side of the Delaware, the kind of place with real antique shops, real old estates, and real inherited objects passed down through families who don’t always know what they’re passing down. Setting Devil’s Wood there wasn’t incidental — the story leans on the particular unease of a place that looks entirely ordinary in daylight and entirely different once you start asking what’s actually buried in its history.

A recurring photograph — one that changes, or seems to, depending on who’s looking at it and when — becomes one of the novel’s most unsettling devices, a small, quiet detail that does more to unravel the reader’s sense of what’s real than almost anything louder in the book could.

Devil’s Wood was written to sit squarely in the supernatural thriller space — atmospheric, character-driven horror that trusts dread to build slowly rather than announcing itself. If you’re drawn to stories about inherited curses, objects that carry more than their owners realize, and small towns with old, patient secrets, this one was written for you.

Devil’s Wood is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions, and is included with Kindle Unlimited.