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The Sleeping Trees
by H.A. Hutson
Wildlife biologist Morgan Fontaine arrives in Bladen County, North Carolina, expecting the most extraordinary field assignment of her career — the ancient blackwater cypress groves of the Black River Basin, among the oldest living ecosystems in the eastern United States. What she finds instead is a wetland that watches her back.
The Sonnier cousins, Wyatt and Owen, have kept the secret of their private land for as long as their family has held it — longer than living memory, longer than record. The labyrinth of elder cypress on Sonnier land is no ordinary preserve. The three-thousand-year-old trees are vessels for creatures that predate human understanding, and the Sonniers are their keepers, bound to that role by blood and inheritance and the particular cost of knowing what lives in the dark water.
Morgan is a scientist. She is also a woman who grew up in a haunted place and learned, early, to keep a second journal for the things that didn’t fit the framework. When the labyrinth begins to take an unmistakable interest in her — when the creatures show her mercy they’ve never shown anyone outside the bloodline — even Morgan’s careful, methodical mind has to make room for what cannot be explained.
But something is moving in Blackwater that has nothing to do with the labyrinth’s ancient hospitality. A local woman with real gifts and a decade of patient, burning resentment has found a way into the passages beneath the elder grove, and what she’s taken from it is wearing her like a second skin, punishing her for every mercy she manages, and hunting Morgan with the particular fury of something that has finally decided to stop waiting.
The only thing capable of standing against a Rougarou is another one. And the only person it makes sense to carry it is the woman it’s already coming for.
The Sleeping Trees is the first book in the Blackwater series — a dark, lyrical novel of Southern Gothic mythology, ancient Cajun folklore, and the permanent cost of loving a place and a person who both belong to the most dangerous territory you’ve ever called home.
Release Date: October 10th, 2026
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