Elias Thorne hasn’t been back to Valeridge in twenty years. Not since the “Great Subsidence” swallowed the local schoolhouse and his childhood along with it. But when his father, the town’s only doctor, dies under “extraordinary circumstances,” Elias is forced to return to the decaying Appalachian mining town.
Valeridge is a place where the fog tastes like copper and the residents speak in riddles. As a disgraced medical examiner, Elias begins an unauthorized autopsy on his father, only to find that the man’s internal organs have been replaced by a pulsing, calcified root system. To solve the mystery of his father’s death, Elias must descend into the closed mines of the Valeridge Gorge, where a forgotten hunger waits for a new host. In Valeridge, you don’t just die—you become part of the foundation.