Author’s Note

Where the Mountain Sings grew from my love of mountain towns, family stories, old warnings, and places that seem to remember every footstep ever taken across them. Everville may be fictional, but the feelings that built it are real. I wanted this book to carry that feeling—the sense that the land has a voice, that blood remembers, and that the past is never as buried as folks pretend.

Some of the story also grew from the strange, documented places where science and the unseen have crossed paths. During the Cold War, programs like Project Stargate tried to make instruments of intuition—to train the human mind to reach past walls, distance, and ordinary knowing. That history unsettled me in the best way. It reminded me that mystery does not always live in graveyards and old stories. Sometimes it wears a government badge, hums beneath fluorescent lights, and gets locked away in files marked classified. They weren't necessarily looking for magic in the way a fantasy novel would describe it, but they were absolutely looking for a way to weaponize the human mind to bypass physical barriers, which led them to some very dark and ancient-feeling places.

Fox Ridge is fiction, but the fear beneath it is not: that we are forever digging into the dark, naming what we find, measuring it, weaponizing it—and forgetting that some things beneath the earth may have names of their own.

Research Note: Project Stargate and other Cold War-era investigations into remote viewing and anomalous cognition helped inspire the fictional science-and-secrecy elements of Fox Ridge. For further reading, see declassified Project Stargate materials and Annie Jacobsen’s Phenomena.