The Culling Garden - Vesper Crane

Something is growing in the hollow. It has been waiting for her.

When a carnivorous-plant specialist inherits her dead mother's ninety-acre property deep in the Blue Ridge foothills, she expects paperwork and old grief. What she finds is a sundew species unknown to science - blooming in a granite depression the locals will not name, that no surveyor has ever mapped the same way twice.

The plant is hungry. Not for insects. For bloodlines.

Two hundred years of Tarrow County marriages, births, and disappearances spiral inward toward a single private ledger. The pattern is botanical, hereditary, and precise: certain children, in certain generations, walk into the hollow and are not seen again. Her mother was one of them.

Now the plant has recognized Elspeth. The church, the cemetery sexton, the town she barely remembers - all of them have been quietly preparing the ground.

Some inheritances cannot be refused.

A slow, suffocating horror novel about science, sacrifice, and the will a garden can take from you. If atmospheric dread stays with you long after the last page, begin immediately.