Jack Boone is a journalist, paranormal investigator, and truth-seeker – according to the bio on her website Jack-tales: Investigating the Strange and Unseen in Appalachia.
Jack Boone is an amateur podcaster, conspiracy theorist, and total weirdo – according to most of the people in her small West Virginia town of Clear Holler.
The only place – other than the internet – where Jack isn’t considered strange is Boojum’s, a tavern on the outskirts run by a large, quiet woman named Boojum who lives in the woods, makes moonshine, and rarely wears shoes. (Don’t ask her about local Bigfoot sightings.) Her bar is where those on the fringes come to drink – strange people who don’t come out in the daylight, who haunt the margins, who live in abandoned mines high above town and deep below it.
And through hikers on the Appalachian Trail, who are probably the weirdest of all.
But there’s weird and there’s disturbing, and when one of these hikers vanishes, leaving behind a drenched campsite on a dry night and bloody footsteps leading into the creek, Clear Holler is abuzz with rumor. Jack, recorder in hand, is determined to investigate the mystery to its fullest; not least because the hiker was one of her listeners, and the night she disappeared she was supposed to be meeting Jack in Boojum’s Tavern.
Wracked with concern and guilt, Jack sets out to uncover what happened to the girl she only knew as Sunshine, trekking the long trail through the shadowed mountains and crumbling mine-shafts of Appalachia.
And then a bloodstained spirit in hiking boots manifests in her apartment, seeking the help of her favorite podcaster. The apparition confirms all Jack’s long-held beliefs in the supernatural, and all of her fears about what happened to Sunshine.
Now that the worst has happened, only questions remain: Can a ghost solve her own murder? And can Jack help her do it?
Long Trail is complete and currently with our agency. Excerpts available in the Long Trail fiction tag.
Denali Stannard 