They’ve been hunting us for 40,000 years.

When three families vanish from a dying coal town in West Virginia, former FBI profiler Marcus Cole recognizes a pattern no one else can see—one that stretches back centuries, across continents, connected by a single impossible signature: human skin, surgically removed and stretched on wooden frames in the woods.

He calls in Dr. Nadia Okonkwo, a forensic pathologist whose career was quietly destroyed after she insisted a John Doe exhibited non-human morphology. She doesn’t believe in monsters. She believes in evidence. And the evidence in Vickery is like nothing she’s ever seen.

As Marcus and Nadia dig into the town’s history, they uncover something that has been hiding in plain sight for generations—patient, intelligent predators that wear human skin, mimic human behavior, and hunt with surgical precision. They walk among us. They have for millennia. And they don’t like being found.

In Vickery, the neighbors are too friendly. The smiles arrive too fast. And the eyes don’t blink.

The Brood is a slow-burn investigative horror novel in the tradition of The X-Files and The Thing—a story about two brilliant professionals who follow the evidence to its most terrifying conclusion, and discover that the real horror isn’t what’s hiding in the woods. It’s what’s sitting across from you at the diner, wearing a face that used to belong to someone else.

For readers of The Troop by Nick Cutter, Devolution by Max Brooks, and The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher.