Rootbound

After a public breakdown ends her academic career, botanist Tessa Morrell returns to her rural hometown of Ashford Bend to care for her estranged father. But the soil she once knew is no longer the same.

Crops are growing at impossible rates. Livestock are dying—split open and filled with sweet-smelling fungi. And children are disappearing.

The locals call it a blessing.

Tessa knows it’s a warning.

As she investigates the terrifying resurgence of life in the soil, she uncovers an ancient fungal intelligence that has been blooming beneath their feet for generations. Watching. Waiting. And now, it’s waking up.

Rootbound is the chilling first installment of The Harvest Below trilogy—a slow-burn eco-horror about unnatural growth, ancestral secrets, and the cost of ignoring what lies beneath.