Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From The Unheld by Luke Larkin A girl journeys across the haunted Montana Territory to rescue her father from an otherworldly creature. By Luke Larkin | Published on July 28, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Unheld by Luke Larkin, a horror western out from Hyperion Avenue on August 25th. Charlie’s life is a lonely one. While other twelve-year-olds are in school, she spends her days skinning the animals her mercurial father hunts in the woods just outside their cabin. And the woods and its twisted creatures—an owl with four wings, a boar with two heads, a fox with gills—are becoming stranger by the day.One night, a nightmarish beast appears and drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him, she enlists the aid of two unlikely allies also in search of the beast: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit. Yet as the trio prepare for the confrontation with the beast, Charlie must decide if her father, a brusque man who has always withheld his affection, is ultimately worth saving. Buy the Book The Unheld Luke Larkin Buy Book The Unheld Luke Larkin Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Charlie followed her father along the dusty road and did her best not to look at the hog. It lay heavy in the back of the cart, jerking awkwardly this way and that with every rut and stone the splin­tered wheels met, and with every jostle Charlie’s father cursed the thing under his breath. He cursed its ugly, gnarled hooves and its ugly, rib-lean belly, and its ugly, ugly heads. The hog paid him no mind. It just lay in the cart, dead and watching Charlie from its two sets of vacant eyes as she followed behind, grinning with its two twisted mouths, both held open in silent squeals. It was a staring contest, two against one, and Charlie was an unwilling opponent. She wished the thing were gone and hoped her father would sell it quickly. “What’re you up to back there?” her father said in his gruff voice. “Sure as hell don’t feel like you’re pushing. That’s the deal. I pull, you push. Unless you’re fixing to pull, but I can’t say you’re much good in front.” Charlie didn’t want to push. She didn’t want to come any closer to the grotesque animal her father had shot and killed in the forest. He’d hunted plenty of strange creatures in the past few months, none fit to sell: a mink as long in the body as a snake; a pheasant with the wings of a sparrow; a fox that, for as far as her father could figure, had gills on either side of its throat. Once, her father brought home a mountain lion, and Charlie watched, squirming, as he split it down the stomach with his knife and found nothing at all on the inside, as though the animal had been only a walking pelt, empty save for the stale and putrid air that rushed out of the cavity and licked Charlie’s face. The hog was her father’s first quarry in weeks that was nor­mal enough to sell, and he was hoping to get a good price at the butcher. It was the same for every hunter in the territory—mostly twisted-up animals that nobody dared eat. A hog halfway normal was bound to fetch a halfway fair sum. Or so they hoped. This all began with the disappearance of the deer last fall. Charlie’s father, being a hunter and so often wandering in the forest, was among the first to notice. He ventured out from their cabin into the trees and came home empty-handed for a week straight, and this set his temper simmering. For days, he trudged through the door and stamped the muck from his boots and grum­bled: “Ain’t a damned one out there. Not a single goddamned one.” He’d say this more to himself than to Charlie, and he’d mutter it all through the evening. A fruitless week became a fruitless month became a barren season with not a single buck or doe or fawn in sight, like they’d lit straight out for another country, perhaps one with better graz­ing, or fewer wolves, or somewhere without hunters to shoot them dead. That’s what Charlie figured, at least. But then the wolves disappeared too, and the bears next, and even the small fish in the streams, so that for a long while the only things to be found in the woods were the squirrels, chittering away as though nothing were amiss. Charlie’s father trapped and skinned and butchered these, and for a while the two survived on nothing but squirrel, and when they became desperate, they’d make the trip into Plainsend to retrieve scant milk and eggs and flour, paid for with credit from the grocer, though who knew how long until Charlie’s father could pay the grocer back. Then the beasts. That’s what her father called them. They weren’t animals, or they were almost animals, but with some other thing mixed in as well. Too many eyes, or too few. Mismatched tails and missing limbs or too many heads, like the hog before Charlie now. The very first her father ever shot was a headless coyote. He brought it home to the cabin and Charlie helped him butcher it, holding its hind legs splayed as he took to it with the knife. Where the coyote’s head should have been, its neck simply ended in a mound of fur. They couldn’t bring themselves to eat it. The meat was tough and scant, but there was also something foul about the animal itself, something that eluded Charlie and her father, and that they didn’t care to think on. Her father burned the coyote, and he burned the next two animals—a goose with fur rather than feathers and a rabbit with the legs of a fawn. They were wicked, he said. But he couldn’t afford to burn them for long. They had to eat. Eventually, Charlie’s father shot whatever he saw—wickedness be damned—and brought the animals to the butcher. The butcher turned up his nose and waved him away and the people crowded around outside to see what new and terrible thing the hunter and his daughter had bagged now. Sometimes Charlie’s father could sell his catch to a passerby. More often, he and Charlie wheeled it back out of town and nearly blackened it over a fire. It was easier to swallow that way. “Meat’s meat,” her father said over his bowl. And true, Charlie thought, even the wicked and malformed animals looked harmless when diced and smothered in a stew. Or at least then you couldn’t tell them from the normal ones. They ate what they could stom­ach, save for the fish, which returned to the streams as strangers long in the body or else with too many spiny bones or their gills bleeding black bile, and always they tasted rancid and contami­nated every stew they entered. At any rate, the animals weren’t right, and that was just the start of it. Excerpted from The Unheld, copyright © 2026 by Luke Larkin. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Unheld</i> by Luke Larkin appeared first on Reactor.