Books by J.B. Fox

Milk and Cornbread

A Dark Appalachian Novel of Kentucky During the Great Depression

“Sometimes the hollow gets lonely, and it picks a child to keep it company.”

Casey County, Kentucky, 1940. Widowed Mae Whitaker works two rented acres of burley tobacco, in debt to the bank and to her landlord. When her seven-year-old daughter Elsie begins slipping down to the springhouse at four o'clock every day with a cup of milk and cornbread, Mae must decide what is real.

Built on an old Upland South belief that a black snake can charm a lonely child, Milk and Cornbread is a quiet, slow-burn Appalachian folk horror novel about a mother's love set against folk terror, poverty and dangerous religious certainty, and a woman who prayed and then went and borrowed a rifle.

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Bloody Breathitt Bastards

Power, Blood, and the Men Who Ruled Eastern Kentucky

In the mountains of eastern Kentucky, the law belonged to whoever owned it. In Breathitt County, it was owned by the Hargis brothers. Judge James Hargis kept the county's books, its jail and its sheriff. Ed Callahan wore the badge and answered to no one but the Judge. When a stubborn lawyer named James Marcum began filing papers that could break their hold, the town of Jackson learned what that kind of power costs. A man was shot dead in the courthouse door in broad daylight, and a street full of witnesses suddenly couldn't remember a thing. But the killings were only the beginning. Behind the Judge stood a quieter brother, a man who never raised his voice, never fired a shot and never lost a dollar he didn't mean to lose. As the trials, the troops and the newspapers came, and as the family fortune began to come apart, one Hargis was counting every move. Some debts in Breathitt are paid in blood. Others are collected over a lifetime. Drawn from court records and newspaper accounts of the feud the nation called "Bloody Breathitt," Bloody Breathitt Bastards is a brutal, unflinching historical novel about kinship, greed and the men who ruled Kentucky by the gun, and about what was left of them when it was over.

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That Odd Fellows Circus Murder

Murder at Crab Orchard Springs

Six shots in the steam. Five wounds. Three pistols. And a town that decided what happened before the smoke cleared. Crab Orchard Springs, Kentucky, July 1881.

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Trueborn American Shadows

A Historical Fiction Collection

Trueborn American Shadows: A Historical Fiction Collection is a 13-book series by J.B. Fox. Titles in the series: Not Case XX, Making Dad Proud, King of the Dead, Nits Will Make Lice, What Mercy Costs, Eat, Drink, Die., Kentucky Cannibal, Attack on Fort Logan, Acoustic Kitty, Good Rebel Soil, That Odd Fellows Circus Murder, The Barren Faith, Big & Little Harpe's Hell on Wilderness Road.

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Making Dad Proud

A Novel of Henry and Edsel Ford

January 1926. Henry Ford walks into a design room, looks at his son's new car, and takes an axe to it. Making Dad Proud is the story of the most famous father and son in American industry — a sweeping historical novel of loyalty and sabotage, of beautiful machines built inside an ugly system, and of what it cost Edsel Ford to earn the approval he never stopped chasing.

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A Bourbon Country Tale

THE DEVIL'S DESIRE: Where bourbon burns slow and desire runs deeper— she chose the fire anyway.

Where bourbon burns slow and desire runs deeper— she chose the fire anyway. Mara Reid left Danville, Kentucky at 22 swearing she'd never come back.

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Acoustic Kitty

The CIA's Secret Spy Cat Program

The CIA really did try to turn a cat into a listening device. This is the novel of the people who built her. The problem is a room.

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Attack On Fort Logan

A Historical Horror Novel Inspired by the Siege of Logan's Fort, Kentucky, 1777

1777. Kentucky frontier. The fort is surrounded. Inside Logan’s Fort, there is barely enough powder, food, or water to survive—and something in the darkness is beginning to move.

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Bait Shop Confidential

The county is dry. The lake is rising. Everyone in this book is lying to someone they love. Joanne Peel’s father left her a dying bait shop and a bank note she can’t pay.

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Big & Little Harpe's Hell on Wilderness Road

The Historical Novel of America's First Serial Killers

1790s Kentucky Frontier. Two blood-soaked brothers. A trail of unvarnished terror.

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Bramble

The Children Listen

Every child deserves a Friend. Toby Bell, 8, tells his matte-white companion Bo things he will never tell his mother, his teacher, or a priest. That was the product. Everything else was housing.

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Eat, Drink, Die.

The Murderess of Slaughterhouse Gulch

She kept a warm house. She kept it full. Wyoming Territory, 1870s. In a gold camp where men outnumber women a hundred to one, Polly Bartlett knows exactly what hungry men want. A hot supper.

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Echolalia

A Domestic Suspense Novel of Motherhood and Guilt

Your child is listening. And he is about to repeat every secret you tried to bury. You think you are safe in your own home. You lock the doors, check the cameras, and trust the people closest to you.

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Everyone In This Town Knows Something About You

A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

Summer 1989. Hanging Fork, Kentucky. Linda Rae Kowalski is thirty-four and drives Route 6. Seventy-eight Blue Bird, sixty-three kids, two DUIs, and a pocket full of her sister's Dexatrim.

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God Machine LLC

The Answer Is Hungry: Every Question Has a Price

What would you ask, if every answer cost you something? Nancy Vale has spent 20 years debunking psychics, cults, and miracle machines.

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God's Customer Service Department

Your Call Is Important to Us. Please Continue Waiting.

God hasn't taken a customer service call since 1326. The hold time is seven hundred years. And the memo left on the desk reads: DO NOT WAKE ME.

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Godvein

The First Taste: A Scarlight Echo Fantasy Series of the Opioid Crisis, Big Pharma, and the Drug That Steals Your Voice

In New Corinth, they count your halos. Every hit of ECHO fractures your eyes. The number never goes down. The Red strain is worse — it takes your voice. Above 40 decibels, you go silent. Permanently.

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Good As New

Use Everything. Waste Nothing. — A Literary Horror Novel

Lena was told she would be good as new. After the accident, the clinic promised a full restoration. No scars, no trace, no questions. Just their simple rule: Use everything. Waste nothing.

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Good Rebel Soil

The Last Confession of Champ Ferguson: A Novel of the Civil War, Appalachia, and America's First War Crimes Trial

"They're going to hang me for being late." October 1865. Nashville. Champ Ferguson is in a brick cell waiting to become the only Confederate guerrilla ever hanged for war crimes.

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Haint Blue Porch

Tales of Motherhood, Loss, and the Color That Keeps Ghosts Out

Some blues keep ghosts out. Some blues keep them in. January, 1911. In the hills outside Danville, Kentucky, Lida Goode counts what she has: Three chairs. One chipped bowl. A pail that holds water.

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Hall's Gap

A Small-Town Appalachian Horror Thriller

Nothing leaves the mountain whole. Not even the dead.

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Head of the House

The Darkness That Lingers in the Bluegrass: A Southern Folk Gothic Horror Novel

He knocked at the wrong door. She answered as a head on the stairs. In Harrodsburg, Kentucky, a traveling Bible man is asked to carry Ada Pike upstairs, to a shelf of shallow cradles. In every cradle, a head. Every face is looking at him, and every one is hungry.

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House of Likes

A Novel About an Influencer House, a Dying Florida Citrus Town, and the Kids Who Became the Product

Cypress Key, Florida, used to grow oranges. Now it grows content. Sixteen-year-old Ellis Reyes just needs the job.

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Kentucky Cannibal

The Life and Times of Boone Helm

Virginia City, Montana Territory. January 1864. Tomorrow at dawn, they will hang him.

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King of the Dead

The True Story of Lexington's Gravedigger King

Lexington, Kentucky, the wet spring of the cholera year. William “King” Solomon is the town drunk. When the doctors, the preachers and even the gravediggers flee, he stays with a borrowed wagon and a Methodist mule, and he buries the town that turned its back on him.

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Last Rounds

A Jessica Johnson Thriller

Grey’s Anatomy meets True Detective. When an unidentified teenage boy is wheeled into her trauma bay, ER surgeon Jessica Johnson does everything right — and loses him anyway.

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Melon Heads

The Horror of Hollow Creek

They told you they were just a legend. Podcaster Maya Rook built her career debunking monsters. Small towns, missing hikers, ghost stories — she’s heard it all. Then she comes to Hollow Creek.

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Mother Boneyard Tales: The Cycle of Desire

3 Horror Shorts in 1

"What would you turn into, if the thing you want most could actually be handed to you?" In the town of New Bethel, the ground beneath your feet is not empty.

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Mother Boneyard Tales: Three Feasts

A Literary Horror Collection of Cannibalism, Body Horror, and Folk Terror

She is already waiting at your table. Darling. Hush. Eat. You went looking for a book about a thing that eats people. Mother knows. She has been watching you get hungry.

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Nits Will Make Lice

A Killer's Confession from the 1838 Mormon War

He didn't ride to Haun's Mill to kill a ten year old. He told himself he rode to protect his home. October 30, 1838. Shoal Creek, Missouri. 4 p.m. Silas Kee has lost land, money, and standing.

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NOT CASE XX

The Life and Times of W.R. Case and Sons Knives

They came for the stamp. Little Valley, New York, 1911. A stolen steel die puts a trusted family name on counterfeit blades, fire tears through the works, and Will Case makes a choice he will spend the rest of his life trying to explain. A historical novel of fathers, sons and the name stamped on every blade.

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Rabbi Rabies

A Farce in Mourning

Saving a soul is priceless. Saving a buck might just cost Rabbi Harvey his life. Rabbi Harvey Rosenthal has dedicated his life to Brightwater Heights' chronically leaking synagogue—and to the sacred art of cheapness.

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Rawhead

A Novel of Hunger in the Kentucky Knobs

Fred McCready keeps a clean cabin, a locked cellar door, and a pot that is always full. His neighbors come at dusk with their children and their hunger.

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Starship Repo Man

THE WHITE HULL

THE CABLE WENT TIGHT AND THE WHOLE GALAXY LEANED. June Calloway makes her living taking spaceships away from people who can’t pay. She’s good at it.

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Super Dracula

Landlord of the Damned

Super Dracula: Landlord of the Damned is a horror-comedy about power, property, and what it really costs to keep a roof over your head when your landlord drinks blood.

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The Barren Faith

The Shakers of Pleasant Hill, KY

Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, 1855. Bound to the Shakers at four years old, Thomasin Pruitt must sign the Covenant and stay, or walk out the gate to the mother waiting on the Salvisa road with a blue calico dress. Cholera is coming up the river.

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The Billionaire's Lifeboat

Thirteen in the water. Seven make the raft. Only three come home. When the super-yacht Anassa sinks in the South Pacific with no hole, no mayday, and no trace, the world assumes a tragic accident.

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The Children of the Unworthy

The Floating Boy of Appalachia

A boy who floats above the trees. A family bred to see the dead. A faith that feeds on the forgotten. In 1832 Appalachia, the Vales keep the unclaimed dead behind a white fence.

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The Day God Became Small

What God Learned When He Became a Mayfly for One Day

What if God had only one day to live? For all of human history, God has been asked the same impossible questions. Why do we suffer? Why do prayers go unanswered? Why does life end?

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The Dog Eats First

A Folk Horror Novel of Winter Hunger and Terrible Bargains

It never took. It only received. The hollow is shut by snow. The road will not open until April. The cellar will not last until March.

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The Erebus Toll

A Kestrel Crew Military Sci-Fi Thriller: Echos of the void (Part 1)

Newton doesn’t care about your corporation. Neither does she. Eighty years after Earth died by a thousand cuts, humanity didn’t find freedom among the stars — it found new landlords.

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The Last Human Job

An AI Dystopian Thriller

In 2032 America signed the Full Automation Accord. Work was reclassified as a hazard to ourselves. Every job was automated. In exchange we get Grace Pay. $7,400 a month. No application, no means test.

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The Last Sane Cop in London

PC Solomon Walker has been a Met officer for ten years.

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The Lies We Grow

The Most Followed Wife In The County

THE MOST FOLLOWED WIFE IN THE COUNTY IS HIDING THE MOST UNFOLLOWABLE TRUTH. She had 211,000 followers, 11 perfect acres, and a husband who made sure every sunrise looked golden.

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The Man We Made Famous

How One Kentucky Town Built a Star and Never Told Him

What if you became the biggest name in American music — and never saw a single message from the people you helped?

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The Mother Load

A Postpartum Psychological Thriller

She can hear everything. Especially the things that aren't supposed to be there. Cora Vaughn is a sound editor. She hears the clipped gain, the fan ticking at 14.2 seconds, the lie hidden in room tone.

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The Nordic Protocol: Lyror's Road (Book Two)

A Science Fiction Thriller - First Contact, Lost Colony, and the Door That Opens

11 MILLION SAID NO. For eleven thousand years, they mined gold to buy time. Forty units were pulled from Site Nine, resettled in the Nevada desert, and catalogued as a second chance. Dr.

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The Nordic Protocol: The Other Children (Book Three)

A First Contact Thriller

In eleven days the page stops taking names. Forever. Two names are on it out of four hundred million. One is in a cell. The Closing Bill would shut kass-mira - the count with no bottom - permanently.

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The Nordic Protocol: Vault Nine

For 12,000 years, humanity was protected. Now the protection has failed.

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The Painless

A Small-Town Folk Horror Thriller

In Blackwood, Missouri, no one feels pain. And no one can leave. For twenty-seven years, retired sheriff Eli Vance has lied about how his wife died. He told his daughter he stayed and held her hand.

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The Pig King's Feast

A Folk Horror Novel

They fed him like they loved him—which was worse than hate. In the quiet, decaying hollows of 1970s Cloverlick, Kentucky, debt isn't settled with money. It is settled in meat.

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The Proxy Mom

He's had four mothers in two years. Three of them are gone.

Three beautiful women. All hired before her. All gone. And none of them will return her messages.

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The Reparations Engine

What If We Could Actually Invoice History? A Political Thriller About AI, The UN, and Who Owes What

VERITAS NUMERANDA. The truth must be made countable. Secretary-General Amara didn't campaign on reparations. She campaigned on process. Her solution: The Department of Historical Justice.

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The Stand-In

A skincare founder who freezes in crowds and a broke makeup artist with her exact face strike a dangerous deal.

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The Surrogate Grandmother

A Psychological Thriller of Motherhood, Secrets, and Betrayal

She carried her daughter's baby. She never meant to give her back. Grace Miller has survived four failed embryo transfers, and she is running out of money, time, and hope.

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The Work Wife Calls

Jenna Cole has been out for 8 weeks. Her out-of-office still says "RETURNING MONDAY" - it's said that every Monday for a month.

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What Mercy Costs

A Novel of War, Failure, and the Birth of Eli Lilly and Company

He wanted to make pure medicine. First he had to learn what purity costs. Greencastle, Indiana. 1861.

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Passing White

A Story of Race, Blood and Skin in 1960s Memphis

A single spark in Los Angeles burned away everything Elijah Judge thought he knew. Left with nothing after a devastating house fire claims his parents, Elijah flees north, carrying a fragile secret and an impossible inheritance. In the rain-slicked streets of 1960s California, Elijah tries to outrun the rigid color lines and brutal prejudices of a fractured America. Passing in plain sight, he navigates a dangerous labyrinth of hidden identities, family reckonings, and simmering racial tensions that threaten to expose who he is—and who he isn't. When a long-buried truth resurfaces, Elijah is forced to confront a devastating choice: protect the lie that keeps him safe, or risk everything for a fraction of the truth.

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They All Eat Brains

A Horror-Comedy

Wren Halloway, 22, has the worst best job in Hollywood. She's second assistant to Marty Lark, America's beloved late-night uncle. Then she sees the private dinner list. The spoons are tiny, silver, and way too sharp. Nobody will tell her what's in the bowl, but everybody wants seconds. They All Eat Brains is a deliciously deranged horror-comedy about fame, hunger, and the world's most exclusive reservation. Content warning 18+: graphic horror violence, cannibalism, body horror and strong language.

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