A haunting, atmospheric masterpiece of Balkan folk horror…
Some fields yield wheat. This one demands a choir.
Every October, the quiet Macedonian village of Dolen Kamen keeps its lights burning and its doors locked. No one sleeps. At four in the morning, a harrowing sound rises from the chest-high wheat fields below the local church: high, wordless singing echoing from beneath the warm, living soil. Underneath the chorus, forty lit houses hum a single, unbroken note to drown out the call.
When elderly resident Stojan Trajchev vanishes into the night, leaving behind only a split church shirt, his pristine lower jawbone, and a minute-long voice recording, his panicked granddaughter sends the audio file to Professor Max Neumann-Schneider, a linguistics scholar at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje.
Analyzing the spectrograph, Max uncovers an impossible sound signature: four distinct human voices singing continuous vowels with zero consonants or pauses, supported by a low, subterranean vibration beneath the earth. Alongside Mia, a fragile young woman recently released from an asylum who hears the singing inside her own head every night, Max travels into the isolated hills to investigate.
As the final night of October approaches, Max unravels a chilling history stretching back to 1962: an ancient entity lies buried under Dolen Kamen. It only stirs when someone sings in their sleep, threatening to turn over and unleash catastrophe upon the valley. To keep the creature dormant, the terrified villagers have stayed awake every night for decades, sacrificing those who slip into slumber.
When Mia is drawn irresistibly toward the field to become the creature’s fifth singer, Max must race against time and an entire village determined to protect their deadly secret to snap her awake before the ground splits wide open.
Eerie, fast-paced, and steeped in rich regional lore, The Singing Fields of October is a chilling tale of modern folk horror, ancient soil, and the deadly cost of sleep.
Paperback edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLT1MQH6
Kindle edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLRF24KR