Jeremy Haun knows what it’s like to be uneasy out in the woods, and so of course, he wants to share that with readers in his latest story, The Folk of Dooney Hollow.
“I want you to feel like you’re there. I want you to feel the chill in the air. I want you to hear the snap of the twigs around you in an otherwise silent place, and be a little scared by it.”
Haun’s topical commentary approach to horror has taken his readers to the catastrophic depths of physical augmentation in The Beauty, and horrifying wavelengths of social media platforms in Murder Podcast, but his The Folk of Dooney Hollow, out now from Ignition Press, takes a walk through the woods and folkish frights of his youth in the Ozarks in Missouri.
Jeremy Haun at NYCC 2026
“There’s something special about that place…a beautiful, strange, haunted quality to it.”
Haun has taken readers to strange places, but for him, taking readers home to the hills and hollows of Missouri required a turn inwards.
“Folk horror is such a fascinating topic, we get so much from either overseas in Europe or from New England, and we get stuff from Appalachia…but I wanted to write about where I live and connect to where I’m from. Living in that strange world, those back hollows and woods.”
For some readers in more urban spaces, Haun says, the idea that you can walk out in the woods for hours and never encounter another person can be a challenge to explain.
“We understand that those places are out there, no matter where you’re from. I wanted to build this environment of the Ozarks and set you in those woods and let you feel it as much as possible in that first issue,” said Haun. “A lot of people say that my work can be a bit of a slow burn - but that’s intentional.”
In this case, the slow burn is a long walk through the dark woods.
When Haun was growing up, his family relocated from the city to his grandparents' farm, out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. In contrast to the low light and sounds of the city, he says he was struck by how dark the backcountry gets–and how quiet.
Haun describes a deep, dark quiet, broken by frightening new sounds - the all-too-human scream of pigs from the farm, the gnawing drone of crickets.
But by day, those same hills and hollows of the Missouri backcountry held a degree of endlessness.
“I’d go out hiking with my brother and we’d wander into places where you’d realize that people hadn’t been in forever. And those places felt like a special kind of haunted,” says Haun. “I really wanted to convey that idea and talk about this idea that we’ve taken over so much of this country, but there are still vast places where a person hasn’t set foot in maybe generations.”
Haun explains that there are two types of hollow in this story: The idea of a hollow as the low point between two hills, and also–how a hollow means a space, empty and between places.
Folk of Dooney Hollow plays with the idea that a people, an entire town could get pulled into and lost inside of a hollow. And that there are two forms of hollow, the physical and the personal, existing in tandem, calling out to each other.
“Maybe sometimes, there is a reason that people are there. A hollow that exists inside of someone, that’s pulled to by that place.”
