DEADROOT

A year after Caleb Raines was buried, he knocks on his mother's door.

He is cold, barefoot, and caked in cemetery mud. He calls Nora by a name only Caleb knew. He remembers the last morning she saw him alive.

Grief tells her to let him in.

At McGlendin Gap Cemetery, caretaker Elaine Carver has troubles of her own. Grass is dying in branching lines. Fresh earth shifts over sealed graves. Roots move where no living tree could reach. The Confession Tree is gone, but the evil beneath it has found a new place to feed and a new way to use the dead.

Then Caleb begins remembering other lives.

As borrowed voices spread through the cemetery and the thing inside Nora's home grows more possessive, Elaine uncovers a horror fed by every name spoken over a grave. To stop it, both women must face the truth grief has taught them to fear:

Remembering the dead is an act of love.

Needing them to come back can open the door to something else.

Not every root feeds the living.

R.D. Parrish is an American author whose work blends atmospheric horror, Southern Gothic melancholy, and deeply human storytelling. A Marine Corps veteran and longtime resident of the American South, Parrish draws inspiration from the quiet places-flooded fields, forgotten towns, and the heavy, humid stillness where memory clings to the earth.

His debut novel, Hollow Ground, is an intimate rural-horror tale set in the fictional Mississippi Delta community of Gethsemane Parish, where relentless rain awakens an ancient, listening intelligence beneath the soil. Parrish is known for crafting horror that is slow-burning, emotional, and rooted in character-stories where fear emerges not from monsters, but from misunderstanding, grief, and the fragile ways humans try to connect.

Parrish writes with a focus on atmosphere, psychological depth, and the strange beauty of the natural world. When he isn't writing, he enjoys time with his family, exploring small-town history, and working on the next haunting story set in the world just beneath our feet.

He lives in the United States with his wife, De.