Raven's Peak Goes Free July 7: Start World on Fire

There's a town in the Rocky Mountains I think about more than I should. It isn't real. I built it. But I made it out of enough real dread that it stuck to me anyway, and for five days this July I'm giving it away.

From July 7 through July 11, 2026, Raven's Peak — the first book in my World on Fire series — is free on Kindle. No catch. No newsletter wall, no email handed over at the door. You tap the button, it lands on your device, you start reading.

I want to talk about why I keep pointing new readers at this book, what you're actually walking into, and how a story about demons turned into a story about faith and the people who lose it.

The pitch, before I get sentimental

Here's the short version, because you should know what you're signing up for before I start talking about what it means to me.

A priest is murdered in front of a young man named Haatim Malhotra. A scarred woman shoots the thing that did it. And somehow Haatim is the reason all of it happened.

Hell is closer than you think.

He grew up on his grandmother's warnings about the thin walls between worlds, and he never believed a word of it. Abigail Dressler — a Hunter for the Council of Chaldea — is about to change his mind, with a box of blessed rounds and a story he does not want to hear. Because Haatim has been marked. A demon lord named Abaddon hollows out a chosen vessel and wears it like a coat, and Haatim is next in line.

Something worse is already loose in the town of Raven's Peak. A demon that doesn't bother to possess you. It rots your mind from the inside without ever stepping through your skin, and the handful of people left in that mountain town have all gone quietly, violently insane.

The Council's plan is simple. Find the demon. End the demon. If they fail, napalm drops in two hours and everyone still inside Raven's Peak burns.

That's the engine. Now let me tell you what it's really about.

Why I start everybody here

People ask me where to begin with my books, and there are a lot of doors now. Space opera. Post-apocalyptic stuff. A couple of series I'm genuinely proud of. But I keep pointing at this one.

Part of it is practical. Raven's Peak is a clean front door. You don't need a map, a wiki, or four other books read first. A guy who doesn't believe in any of this gets dragged into the middle of it, which means you learn the rules exactly when he does. No homework.

Part of it is more selfish. This is the book where I figured out what I actually wanted to write. I had ideas about demons and Hunters and a secret Council kicking around for years, and they were fine. They were never alive until I dropped a scared, ordinary person into the middle of them and made the whole supernatural apparatus his problem. Haatim isn't chosen because he's special. He's chosen because something with teeth decided he'd make a good coat. That flip is the whole book for me.

And part of it is Abigail. I didn't want a cool, untouchable warrior. I wanted someone who has done this long enough to be tired, who wears her scars on the outside because the inside ones don't show as well. She is competent and she is breaking, both at the same time, and the friction between those two things drives more of the story than any demon does.

A little about the world you're stepping into

The war in these books is old. That's the first thing to know. The Council of Chaldea has been fighting it in the dark for a very long time, and it shows — in the rules they follow, the corners they cut, and the things they've decided they can live with. They aren't a clean order of holy knights. They're people who made hard calls for so many years that the hard calls stopped feeling like a choice.

The demons aren't interchangeable monsters, either. Abaddon wears people. Belphegor poisons them from a distance and never lifts a finger. Each one is its own specific kind of wrong, with its own method and its own logic, and learning the difference between them is part of what keeps you off balance. You can't fight them all the same way, and the book makes Haatim and Abigail figure out which kind of horror they're dealing with before it's too late.

And the whole thing happens behind a curtain. Ordinary people don't know any of this is real, and keeping it that way costs more than you'd think. When the answer to a problem is two hours and a load of napalm, you understand pretty fast how far the Council will go to keep the curtain closed. That willingness — to burn a town to bury a secret — tells you everything about the world you've just walked into.

The two people you'll spend the book with

Strip away the demons and this is a book about two people learning whether they can trust each other when getting it wrong gets them killed. Haatim doesn't want any of this. He's grieving, he's out of his depth, and he keeps waiting for someone to tell him he can go home. Abigail can't give him that. What she can give him is the truth, in pieces, as fast as he can stand to hear it.

They don't fall into an easy partnership. She's spent years not getting attached, for reasons the book makes painfully clear, and he's a liability she didn't ask for and can't put down. Watching them go from her dragging him along by the collar to actually relying on each other is, honestly, the part I'm proudest of. The demons raise the stakes. The two of them are what make the stakes matter.

It gets personal fast, too. Arthur — Abigail's mentor, the closest thing she has to family — is taken by something even the Council steps carefully around. So this isn't a clean job for her. It's a rescue, and she's scared, and she's pretending she isn't, and Haatim is the one who has to watch her hold it together. That's the engine under the engine.

Where the idea came from

The seed of this whole thing is a grandmother and her stories. Haatim grew up half-listening to warnings about the thin walls between worlds — the kind of thing you nod along to as a kid and roll your eyes at as an adult. I wanted to write a character who inherited a warning he never took seriously, and then make the warning true in the worst possible way.

There's something honest in that, I think. Most of us carry around beliefs we've quietly set down — things we were raised on and stopped carrying somewhere along the way. The book asks what happens when one of those things you set down turns out to have been load-bearing all along. For Haatim it's faith. For you it might be something else. Either way, that's the nerve I was trying to press.

The horror isn't the demon

Here's the part I care about most, and it's the thing the back-cover copy can't quite say.

The scariest stretches of this book have almost nothing to do with a monster lunging out of the dark. They're about watching ordinary people come apart. Belphegor doesn't need to crawl inside you. It gets into a town the way a rumor does, the way despair does, and one by one the people of Raven's Peak stop being people. They keep their faces. They lose everything behind them.

Faith is the strongest weapon.

That, to me, is the real horror — not possession, but erosion. The slow hollowing-out of a person until there's nothing left to save. I wrote plenty of demon-fighting into this book, and I had fun with it, blessed rounds and all. But the parts that still bother me are the quiet ones. The cabin shrines. The neighbor who smiles wrong. The sense that something is already in the walls and has been for a while.

Underneath all of it is a question I couldn't shake while I was writing: what's left of your faith when the thing you stopped believing in turns out to be standing in your kitchen? Haatim lost his faith when his sister died. The book makes him decide, under the worst possible pressure, whether he gets it back. That's the spine. The demons are just what forces him to answer.

I'm not going to soft-sell the content

This is a horror thriller, and I write it like one. There's graphic violence. There's body horror. There are images in here meant to sit with you a little longer than is comfortable. If that's a hard no for you, I'd rather say so now than have you find out at chapter nine.

But if you like that lane, you're going to feel right at home. The easiest way I can describe the shelf this sits on: if you read Jim Butcher's Dresden Files for that ordinary-guy-dragged-into-a-war feeling, or you watched Supernatural and Constantine for the blue-collar, blessed-ammo, demons-are-a-job texture, or The Exorcist got under your skin and stayed there — this is squarely your kind of book. It's a supernatural horror story built on the bones of a theological war, and it doesn't flinch from either half.

Why give the first book away at all

Honestly? A free first book is the most honest sales pitch I've got. Read it. If it's not for you, you're out nothing but a few evenings, and we part as friends. A series lives or dies on whether the first book earns the second one, and I'd rather let the story make that argument than ask you to take my word for it.

It's also the anchor. Raven's Peak is where everything in World on Fire starts — the people, the war, the rules, the cost. If you're going to read this series, I want you to start at the start, and the easiest way to make that happen is to take the price tag off the door for a few days.

How the free days work

Simple. Mark the dates: July 7 through July 11, 2026. Five days. During that window the Kindle edition of Raven's Peak costs nothing. No coupon, no code. The price on Amazon will just say free, you grab it, and it stays in your library even after the promo ends.

If you're a Kindle Unlimited member, good news — it's in KU all year, so it's free to you any time, promo or not. The free days are really for everyone who isn't in KU and has been meaning to give the series a shot.

And if you're reading this after the 11th — first, sorry, you missed the giveaway. Second, it's a couple of bucks and still in Kindle Unlimited, so you're not exactly priced out. Grab it whenever the mood for something dark comes around.

If you'd rather be hunted out loud

When I'm not writing books, I build voice games for Alexa. Same instincts, different format — I like dropping you somewhere dark and making the next choice matter.

If Raven's Peak puts you in the mood, try Darkness Falls on Alexa. It's a dark-fantasy adventure where you make the calls and the calls have weight. Same author, same love of the genre, no Kindle required — just say the word and you're in.

Five days

That's the whole pitch. A scared man, a scarred Hunter, a dead mining town in the mountains, and a clock running down to fire. For five days in July it costs nothing to find out how it goes.

I hope you spend a night in Raven's Peak. I hope you don't sleep great afterward.

Mark July 7. Set a reminder. And when the day comes, go get it.