The killings started twenty years ago. The children of the mayor, the boss of the gasworks, and the local sheriff, all died horribly, mysteriously, followed shortly by their parents.

In the decades-long quiet that followed that sudden spate of awful violence, rumors spread through Angel Falls that the deaths had something to do with the family who died shortly before the gasworks was built on their land at the top of the falls. Or with their young son, Ephram Goode, missing ever since his family’s cabin burned to the ground.

Danny Brice knows more of the horrible truth about those killings than anyone else left alive. He’s lived with the scars ever since. Now, as he limps back into Angel Falls with a bag full of heroin and a line on a deal that could finally change his life for the better, Danny keeps one eye on the woods, on the shadows between the trees.

Ellen Ng Randall — dispatcher, medic, veteran — carries trauma of her own. Despite the love of her husband and teenaged daughter, the fears she can’t shake keep her a prisoner in her own house. But when Ellen and Danny’s worlds violently collide, she’ll discover there are far, far worse things to be afraid of in Angel Falls.

Download PDF

I like to invert and deconstruct all the stuff that scared me as a kid. So … what if a slasher finished his rampage and didn’t get to return to death? What if he wasn’t inherently evil, just balancing the cosmic scales? And what if he stumbled upon something in his long, lonesome, endless existence worth protecting?

Goode was my first (admittedly wordy) crack at writing screenplays — action-packed, darkly funny, weirdly kind, working its own strange magic to turn a slasher villain into a sort of superhero.