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A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks
by Benjamin Hale
With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.
This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale's cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state's history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the "imaginary friend" she met in the woods—would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.
Enriched by Benjamin Hale's own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas.
"An engrossing and rigorous account of a haunting crime." —Publishers Weekly
"A story of true crime that evokes the idea of good and evil both seen and believed." —Kirkus Reviews
"What begins as intriguing true-crime tales shifts into a psychological deconstruction and a philosophical journey attempting to understand the power that religion—specifically Christianity—possesses to influence one's perception of themselves and reality ... . Readers looking for a story thick with deeper ruminations underneath an intriguing true-crime narrative will be satisfied." —Booklist
"Cave Mountain holds an extraordinary story, conveyed and explored by Benjamin Hale with tremendous breadth of perception, immense eloquence, and equal measures of perspective and compassion." —Jane Hirshfield, author of The Asking: New and Selected Poems
"A big hearted, deeply learned work of literary Southern crime. Benjamin Hale goes into the woods looking for a body and leaves with something like grace." —Max Marshall, author of Among the Bros
This information about Cave Mountain was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories. His writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, teaches at Bard College and Columbia University, and lives in a small town in New York's Hudson Valley.
If you liked Cave Mountain, try these:
by Liz Moore
Published 2025
When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide.
by Michelle Collins. Anderson
Published 2024
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention for readers of Kristy Woodson Harvey, Donna Everhart, Sue Monk Kidd, Jeannette Walls, and Rita Mae Brown…
by Ashley C.. Ford
Published 2022
One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the looming absence of her incarcerated father.
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