Gone to See the River Man

Lori is a "monster fangirl" — a lonely woman whose obsessions with true crime and horror have curdled into an infatuation with Edmund Cox, a notorious imprisoned serial killer she writes to in prison. When Cox sets her a task — travel to his old hometown, retrieve a key hidden in a chest, and carry it to a mysterious figure called the River Man — Lori seizes it as a chance to prove herself worthy of his twisted affection.

Dragging her physically and mentally disabled sister Abby along, Lori sets out on a journey that curdles from grim to surreal to nightmarish. The river runs with flesh, the cabin at its end is a vault of horrors, and ghostly blues music drifts through the mountains as her own buried demons rise to meet her.

A winner of the Splatterpunk Award, Kristopher Triana's Gone to See the River Man is uncompromising, extreme horror — a bleak, transgressive descent into obsession and depravity that is not for the faint of heart. It is the first book in the River Man series.