Peter came back from war expecting the smell of pine needles and his sister’s laugh. What he got was nothing.
Havenwood is still there — the same streets, the same houses, the same half-eaten bowl of cereal on the kitchen table. But the people are gone. Not dead. Erased. Clocks frozen at 10:17. Photographs with faces rubbed smooth like someone dragged a thumb across wet ink. Voices on the phone that sound almost like the ones you loved… until they start repeating your own words back to you a second too late.
Something ancient has woken up in the quiet. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t hunt. It unmakes. It takes the sound first, then the memories, then the people themselves — unwriting them from reality until even their own families can’t hold their faces in their minds anymore. The Silence isn’t empty. It’s hungry. And now it knows Peter’s voice.
Armed with nothing but a soldier’s stubborn refusal to forget, a strange amulet that pulses with faint resistance, and the last fragments of his sister Sarah’s voice echoing from beneath a church floor, Peter has to fight a war that doesn’t use bullets. Every memory he clings to becomes a beacon. Every name he speaks becomes a door. And something vast and patient is already listening… already choosing its next meal.
This is cosmic horror with teeth. Lovecraftian dread wrapped in the raw, unflinching voice of a combat vet who’s already survived one apocalypse only to come home and find the real one was waiting in his living room. No cheap jump scares. No easy answers. Just the slow, suffocating realization that reality itself can be eaten — and that the thing doing the eating has been here longer than memory.
From the same degenerate trenches that brought you the Two in the Trenches podcast — war stories, dice rolls, and the kind of shit-talk that keeps the void from getting too comfortable — comes the first novel in the Trenches Presents imprint. Where the Silence Screams is what happens when the battlefield follows you home a