The Root Witch

A beautiful forest. A terrifying legend.

It's 1986. Two strangers, hundreds of miles apart, grapple with disturbing incidents in a one-of-a-kind quaking aspen forest.

Knox is a new Forest Service ranger assigned to a vast, remote territory in Utah.

Sandy is a producer fighting for her place in a tough TV newsroom.

Both have heard about the shadowy figure believed to menace visitors to the forest. When a man disappears and reports of the Root Witch begin coming in, Knox and Sandy are plunged into a living nightmare.

Their lives converge on Halloween. Sandy sends a news crew to investigate the sightings. But when the team goes missing, and a shocking video surfaces revealing the ghastly truth, Knox and Sandy face the biggest decision of their lives.

This novel is based on a short story, "The Root Witch: An Urban Legend Caught on Tape."

The Root Witch is part of Debra Castaneda's Dark Earth Rising series of standalone novels. Read the books in any order.

Debra Castaneda is an award-winning horror and dark fiction author based on the central coast of California.Her works include The Spore Queen, The Devil's Shallows, The Root Witch, The Copper Man, Circus at Devil's Landing, and A Dark and Rising Tide, which comprise the Dark Earth Rising series of standalone novels, and The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, an International Latino Book Awards gold medal winner.Debra loves writing character-driven stories about people who experience scary things, and how they react when confronted with the unexpected. She's committed to representing Latinas and Latinos in her books.For inspiration, she draws from her experience as a TV and radio journalist, and as a third-generation Mexican American. Over the years, she's lived in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Portland, and the San Francisco Bay area.Debra now lives in Capitola, California with her husband. She enjoys rediscovering the Mexican dishes of her childhood and texting her two daughters about her latest binge-watch.