J.B. Fox Appalachian Folk & Horror Colle Rawhead: A Novel of Hunger in the Kentucky Knobs, (Paperback)

Fred McCready keeps a clean cabin, a locked cellar door, and a pot that is always full. His neighbors come at dusk with their children and their hunger. They leave with something to eat, and they never ask what it is. Alma learns the rules fast: Sit when you're told. Eat what you're given. Never go down the cellar steps. And every night, set out a bowl of milk for Rawhead. The county calls the milk superstition. The preacher calls it sin. Fred calls it manners. But the bowl is always empty by morning, and beneath the root cellar there is a cave where something older than the church is still being worshipped. Alma wants to belong, and she can't tell what she is learning from what she is being taught. The deeper she goes, the less she is sure the thing in the dark is the worst thing in the story. Rawhead is a slow-burning Southern Gothic horror novel. Its roots are in Appalachian folklore, the blood-stopping verse, lined-out hymns, and the nursery warnings mothers whispered to keep children close to the fire. It asks what hunger can make decent people do, and what love will forgive when the alternative is an empty table.