Pilliga: Shadows of the Dreamtime

The forest remembers.
And it is done sleeping.

Deep in the vast Pilliga Forest of rural New South Wales, ancient stories were never meant to be written down - or spoken aloud. For over sixty thousand years, the Gamilaraay people passed down warnings of what lay sealed beneath the earth: old things, hungry things, bound by blood, song, and silence.

When a military training exercise disturbs the forest's hidden places, those bindings begin to fail.

At first, the signs are easy to dismiss - livestock found torn apart, unnatural silences, shadows that bend where they shouldn't. Then people start to vanish. Soldiers. Truck drivers. Locals who know better than to wander too far after dark.

As fear grips the town, a dry-witted police sergeant and a handful of locals are forced to confront a truth buried deeper than the roots of the forest itself. The stories weren't superstition. They were warnings. And the things rising now are ancient, intelligent... and learning.

Blending creeping dread, dark humour, Aboriginal Dreaming-inspired folklore, and small-town tension, Pilliga is a haunting Australian horror novel about what happens when mankind outlives its protectors - and must face what was never meant to wake.