The Gilded Gallows

The Gilded Gallows In 1650 New England, a settlement built on a buried sin is about to learn that the land remembers what people try to forget. For Deliverance "Liv" Hale, the midwife of New Geneva, hands skilled in herbs and healing have become her condemnation. When a tragic stillbirth follows her intervention, the theocratic settlement needs a culprit. They find one in Liv's gentle sister, Mercy. On the brass-painted gallows meant to showcase divine justice, Mercy's execution becomes something else entirely—a spark. In that moment of shared agony, as Liv and three other wounded women—a bitter widow, an abused servant, and a displaced Penobscot convert—lock eyes, something awakens beneath the soil. The Crimson Weald. It is the forest's long-slumbering memory, a sentient record of every injustice inflicted upon the land and its vulnerable. And it answers their silent, collective scream with a grotesque gift. Their trauma begins to manifest, literally and horrifically. Liv's grief becomes a psychic thread connecting their fury. The widow's lifelong bitterness now weeps from her eyes, like acid eating stone. The servant's silenced screams take flight as swarms of bruise-colored moths. The convert's stolen heritage lets her translate the forest's ancient, furious will. Together, they are an unholy covenant—a biological rebellion against the world that sought to break them. But Magistrate Silas Whittemore, a man of cold logic and absolute conviction, sees not vengeance, but a contagion to be eradicated. His counter-attack is not with muskets, but with a terrifying new "science" of holy water and enforced purity, designed to torture their power into self-destruction. When he cages the settlement's children as kindling for a final pyre, Liv faces an impossible choice: become the monster he claims she is and unleash the Weald's full, cataclysmic wrath, or find a more human, more dangerous path to justice. For Readers Who Loved: The fierce sisterhood of The Once and Future Witches, the visceral body horror of The Vegetarian, and the atmospheric dread of The Year of the Witching. Praise for The Gilded Gallows: "A ferocious, phantasmagoric gut-punch of a novel. It literalizes female rage into something both beautiful and terrifying—a root system of revenge growing through the cracks of history." — Author of The Death of Jane Lawrence "Reimagines the witch trial narrative not as a story of victimhood, but of terrifying, ecological transformation. The forest itself becomes an avenging character, and I will never look at the woods the same way again." — Bram Stoker Award-Nominated Author Discover the novel that is being called 'an indelible contribution to feminist horror' and 'a masterclass in weaving historical research with supernatural dread.' Step into the Weald. Listen to its roots. And remember.