What if you had the power to heal your broken family? To bring back a lost loved one? Jessie and Jared are about to find out in a place called Angel Falls, where an ancient and mysterious power waits to fulfill their deepest wishes––with dangerous consequences. Fifteen-year-old Jessie Reed would do anything to keep her parents together. When her father inherits an old house from his elderly and mysterious Cousin Dorothy, Jessie accompanies him to the seaport village of Beauport while her mother stays behind in New York City. Fearing for her parents’ marriage and unnerved by the prospect of spending her summer in “a dead woman’s house,” Jessie strikes out on her own and stumbles across the isolated trails of Angel Falls, a wild and beautiful place that holds the ruins of a three-hundred-year-old town with a strange history. She encounters Jared Younger, a sixteen-year-old local boy who considers these forbidden woods his own. Jared is a caretaker for his father, an artist crippled by depression. Jared feels powerless to save his father––until a series of unexplainable events brings him face to face with a power he never knew he had. Jared’s teacher, Chris Delany, offers to help him understand and control the strange thing happening to him––but are Delany’s motives as pure as they seem? Or, as Jessie suspects, does Delany have a secret agenda of his own that puts Jared in danger? Together, Jessie and Jared discover that the truth is far more dangerous than they could have imagined and that they must work together to save their families and uncover the strange secret of Angel Falls.
Authors
Julia Rust is a writer and teaching artist from the Hudson River valley in New York. With David Surface, she runs Veterans Writing Workshop, bringing free workshops to U.S. veterans and active duty military in the metro-NYC area. Julia has served on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. Julia recently was a featured reader for “A Strange and Darksome Night” hosted by Night Time Logic in NYC. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her story "Tall Dark And" written with David Surface was published in the anthology Uncertainties Vol. III, which Ellen Datlow included on her “Recommended” list in Best Horror of the Year for 2019. ANGEL FALLS is a YA Supernatural thriller, co-written with David Surface and published October 2022 by YAP Books, an imprint of Haverhill House Publishing.
David Surface lives in the Hudson Highlands in a 160-year-old brick house that he shares with his wife, the author Julia Rust, and two cats, Howl and Greebo (named after Dianne Wynn Jones and Terry Pratchett characters). David is the author of Terrible Things, a collection of short stories published by Black Shuck Books. His stories have appeared in genre publications including Shadows & Tall Trees, Supernatural Tales, Nightscript, Morpheus Tales, and The Tenth Black Book of Horror, as well as literary journals such as North American Review, Crazyhorse, Fiction, Marlboro Review, and Doubletake. His stories have been anthologized in Twisted Book of Shadows from Twisted Publishing/Haverhill House Publications, Darkest Minds from Dark Minds Press, and Ghost Highways from Midnight Street Press. A story co-authored with Julia Rust, ‘TallDarkAnd’, appears in the Swan River Press anthology, Uncertainties III. His stories have received long-list Honorable Mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volumes 7 and 8, SFEditors Picks, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction. David is also a regular contributor to Black Static Magazine where his column ‘One Good Story’ appears in the Case Notes section. David enjoys writing, old movies, obscure bookstores, good coffee, bare trees in winter, vintage Halloween decorations, and medieval sacred music, not necessarily in that order. He also enjoys talking with other people about writing––his and theirs.
