Girl in the Creek

Girl in the Creek by Hugo Award winner Wendy N. Wagner is an atmospheric and eerie story about a Pacific Northwest forest that seems to be devouring all who enter. A perfect read for fans of T. Kingfisher and Jeff VanderMeer’s cli-fi cosmic horror.

Mt. Hood National Forest has always been a sanctuary for evil--human and alien.

The shadows of looming trees and long-abandoned mines shelter poachers and serial killers alike. Then there’s the ruined hotel on the outskirts of picturesque small town Faraday, Oregon, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Hood. The one drowning in mushrooms and fungus not even the local expert can identify.

Not to mention the stacks of missing persons cases.

Freelance writer Erin Harper arrives in Faraday to find out what happened to her brother, whose disappearance in the forest has haunted her for years. But someone else has gone missing. And when Erin finds her in the creek, the girl vanishes again -- this time from the morgue, and days later her fingerprints show up at a murder scene.

Maybe it’s a serial killer, or maybe it’s the spores infecting the forest and those lost inside. Erin must find answers quickly, before anyone else goes missing. But she might be next...

WENDY N. WAGNER is a Hugo award-winning editor of short fiction, serving as the managing/senior editor at Lightspeed and the editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine. She is author of The Secret Skin (one of The Washington Post’s best SF/F/H books of 2021), The Deer Kings, and Locus bestseller An Oath of Dogs, and two novels for the Pathfinder role-playing game. She has published more than fifty short stories, which have appeared in markets like Beneath Ceaseless Skies and PseudoPod, and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror 7.