Sallow Bend

Two teenage girls, Clare and Suki, disappear from Sallow Bend, a small rural town, and the community turns out to search for them. The girls are found, but that is where the real trouble starts. An ancient evil that has come to Sallow Bend before is waking, and it does so beneath the lights of a carnival that has just arrived.

Caleb Jackson works as a school janitor and keeps to himself. He reads other people's faces and body language so acutely that meeting anyone's eye is nearly impossible for him. That sensitivity lets him see what the rest of the town cannot: something is wrong, and everyone is in danger.

Caleb grows closer to Tricia Brent, who is still grieving after her son vanished a year ago. Together they face a cycle of events the town has forgotten it is caught in, and Caleb tries to break it before it repeats.

This is a folk-horror novel from Cemetery Dance Publications, written by Alan Baxter. It is tense and bloody, built around missing children, buried secrets and an evil that comes back because nobody remembers its last visit. The setting is small-town and close, and the dread builds from the carnival's arrival.