Hollow Stone: Stonebound Book 1 (Paperback or Softback)

On the quiet shores of Lake Michigan sits Duswood, a small town with a long memory and an even longer silence.

When a local pizzeria becomes the site of a brutal, unexplainable attack, sixteen-year-old Vincent Granger and his friends uncover something ancient stirring beneath the cedar swamp. The adults call it hysteria. The sheriff calls it a bear. But the truth is older, heavier, and still waiting to be remembered.

As the town bends itself around denial, Vincent meets Mira Thorn, a homeschooled girl whose mother vanished under mysterious circumstances. Mira knows the rules of Duswood’s forgetting and what happens when grief takes shape. Together they begin to see the pattern others refuse to face: a creature born from the town’s buried sorrow, a being made of earth and memory, bound to something far darker than anyone dares speak aloud.

But some bindings don’t break, they unravel.

Hollow Stone is a haunting, atmospheric blend of quiet horror and small-town mystery, perfect for readers of Small Favors, The Blackwater series, and Twin Peaks. In Duswood, silence is a form of survival, and what’s forgotten never stays buried for long.

N.B. Cross writes fiction that lingers in the space between sorrow and the surreal. His work explores memory, isolation, and the quiet unease that slips into everyday life. Whether it's a town that forgets itself or a boy haunted by something only he can see, his stories often begin where certainty ends.