Skinwalkers of Eureka Springs

When Micah Sutter returns to Eureka Springs for his grandmother's funeral, he expects only grief and a few days of settling her affairs. Instead he finds the town he left twelve years earlier already unraveling.

Something is killing livestock in the hills above the Victorian streets and limestone stairs. The wounds make no sense. The tracks change from four legs to two. Local officials, eyeing the last weeks of tourist season, prefer mountain lions and coyotes to any explanation that might empty the hotels. The neo-pagan community that has long made Eureka Springs a fragile haven in the Bible Belt knows better. They have an older name for what is walking the hollows: Wampus. Not the gift-shop mascot, but the real thing — a skin-shedding collector of unpaid debts that the land itself remembers.

In 1887 a desperate man named Abram Corvell made a bargain in a black-water hollow to save his dying child. He never paid. The debt has waited more than a century. Now it has come due, and it is wearing faces it has no right to wear.

As the killings move from animals to people, Micah is pulled into a collision of folk tradition, institutional silence, and rising panic. Old prejudices surface. A town that prides itself on tolerance begins deciding who belongs and who does not. When fear finally runs out of easy targets, it turns inward with the same ruthless efficiency it once reserved for outsiders.

Skinwalkers of Eureka Springs is a work of folk horror and body horror about inherited obligation, communal violence, and the price of looking away. It contains graphic violence and a lynching depicted without catharsis. The hills do not forget. Neither should we.