In Dirge Hollow, a burial is not finished when the earth goes back over it. It is finished when someone sings. If no one does within three nights, the dead come home — not raging, just insistent. A husband at the kitchen table. A boy back for breakfast. Wrong in the way only the people who loved them can feel.

Wren Calder arrives in the fog-locked Appalachian town meaning to stay a month at most. A great-aunt she barely knew has left her a funeral home, and Wren intends to sell it and go. The fog has other arrangements: it will not let her car cross the county line while a body lies unsung, and the hill above the churchyard hums after dark.

The only man left who still knows the dirges is Silas Vane, bound to that hill by a bargain older than its oldest grave and losing his voice to it one song at a time. Wren’s trained voice is the first the Hollow’s dead have answered in sixty years. He needs her. She needs to understand why her great-aunt never left this place. Every dirge they sing together costs him a little more of what he has left, and ties the two of them a little tighter. Then a burial fails, the first in decades, because something beneath the churchyard — made of every voice the hill has ever kept — has started to sing back.

Ivy Harrow writes horror that stays intimate rather than gory: casseroles and candlelight, a found family of eccentric mourners, dread that arrives at the kitchen window instead of out in the woods. The romance is a slow burn braided through the work itself, with open-door heat kept mild and a happily-ever-after that has to be earned. Anyone who wants a small town they can smell the woodsmoke in, who likes a guarded heroine paired with a gentle and doomed man, and who prefers a frightening evening to end warm, will settle into this quickly.

Sing Them Down opens Dirge Hollow, a set of interconnected gothic romances in which each book brings a new couple and a new haunting while an older shadow gathers over the whole town. It runs 172 pages and is available in Kindle, paperback and hardcover, with a second volume, The Coffin-Maker’s Waltz, announced. Bring a candle and start at the first grave. Find it on Amazon →