A debt that spans generations, a fire that never goes out.

Kentucky Dragon by Michael Park landed in September 2025 as the centrepiece of a three-book horror debut from Fox Point Books, and it arrives with the kind of confidence that makes you sit up and pay attention. This is folk horror anchored in real history, supernatural horror built on intergenerational trauma, and literary horror that reads like a slow-burning fuse.

The novel follows Mark Morris from an eleven-year-old boy in Louisville, Kentucky, to a damaged adult in Brooklyn, as a demonic debt collector called the chicken man destroys everything he loves and then returns eighteen years later to finish the job. For readers tracking the best folk horror 2025 has to offer, or anyone drawn to German folklore horror fiction that treats its mythological sources with genuine seriousness, this book demands attention.

Kentucky Dragon by Michael Park: A Folk Horror Review

You are never ready for the chicken man. He just shows up. On your doorstep in the melting Kentucky snow, with his discolored fingernails and his quiet talk about icepicks and hammers. Tap, tap, tap through the eyes. That is how you open Michael Park’s Kentucky Dragon, and good luck closing the book after that. It is a horror novel, sure, but it does not feel like one at first. It feels like a memory you have tried to bury. The kind that comes back at 3 AM, fully formed and smelling of damp coal and old fear.

The novel opens in 1998. Eleven-year-old Mark Morris and his family have just moved from Schaumburg, Illinois, to Louisville, Kentucky. Almost immediately, a thin man with discoloured fingernails appears at their door. He tells Mark and his older brother Don to call him “the chicken man.” He knows things about their family he should not know, including details about a sister who died when Mark was four. From this moment, the temperature begins to rise.

Park builds dread through accumulation rather than shock. The chicken man does not arrive with thunder and sulfur. He arrives with a duffel bag and a disconcerting way of walking, something almost animal in his gait.

The novel is split into two halves, cleaved by an eighteen-year gap. The first half follows young Mark as he tries to understand the threat circling his family while the adults around him refuse to speak about it. The second half picks up with Mark as an adult in Brooklyn, working as an electrician, living with his girlfriend Caitlyn, self-medicating with bourbon, and doing everything in his power to convince himself the events of his childhood never happened. Then a phone call comes from Germany. A voice claims to be his sister. The chicken man is back.

What makes the experience of reading this book distinctive is the way Park handles the gap between the two timelines. The eighteen-year silence is not a gimmick. It is the central horror. Mark’s family has survived by refusing to acknowledge what happened to them. The adults in 1998 tell the children nothing. The adult Mark tells himself nothing. The novel’s structure embodies the very mechanism of trauma it depicts: bury it, drink over it, go to therapy, call it a delusion, and hope the thing that caused it has forgotten you. It has not.

The atmosphere is rooted in specific sensory details: snow melting over a mine fire deep underground in Kentucky, the smell of coal smoke drifting through a German village where the earth has been burning for three centuries, the tinny melody of “Barbara Allen” threading through scenes like a cold draught. Park understands that horror lives in the transition spaces, the moments between safety and revelation, and he exploits those gaps ruthlessly.

Park’s prose is the first thing that announces his control over the material. He writes with a flat, unadorned directness that refuses to pretty up what it describes. There is an almost reportorial quality to the sentences, short declarative statements that stack up like evidence being laid on a table. Then, without warning, he will break the pattern with a sentence of eerie lyricism, a description of the chicken man’s movement or a detail about the underground fire, and the contrast is jarring in precisely the way horror needs to be.

The novel is told from Mark’s point of view, first as a child and then as a damaged adult. Young Mark is credulous, perceptive, and desperate for someone to explain what is happening to his family. Adult Mark is a study in avoidance, a man who has constructed an entire personality around the phrase “never speak or think of this again.” The shift in voice between the two timelines is subtle but effective. Young Mark’s sections have a raw, present-tense immediacy; adult Mark’s sections feel heavier, freighted with all the things he has chosen not to process.

Dialogue in Kentucky Dragon does heavy lifting. Park uses conversation as a site of evasion. The Morris family talks around the debt constantly without ever naming it directly. When the great-aunt, Sister Maria Theresa, finally provides some answers, the information arrives in a torrent that is almost overwhelming, a lifetime of suppressed truth spilling out in one scene. The chilling effect comes from the register: this is not a threat delivered with menace; it is instruction, gentle and precise.

Structurally, the two-part division serves the book’s deepest concerns. The eighteen-year gap is a gamble that pays off because Park understands that the reader needs to feel the weight of time passing, needs to experience the false safety Mark builds for himself before the chicken man returns. The pacing is relentless. The chapters are short, the revelations are drip-fed with careful control, and the chicken man reappears just often enough to keep the stakes from ever feeling abstract. Danger hums in the background, constant and uncomfortable.

What is this book actually about? On the surface, Kentucky Dragon tells the story of a demonic debt destroying a family across generations. But Park is after something larger and more uncomfortable. The debt at the centre of the novel is not merely supernatural. It is historical. It connects directly to the atrocities committed by Mark’s grandfather, a Nazi whose crimes are part of the family inheritance, and to something older still, an ancient Germanic entity worshipped in the village of Dudweiler, where a coal fire has been burning since 1668.

This is a novel about intergenerational trauma, about how violence committed in one generation does not simply disappear but seeps into the groundwater and poisons everything downstream. The Holocaust hangs over the book like smoke. The Nazi grandfather’s lamp, made of human skin, is not a throwaway grotesquerie. It is a physical instantiation of the way atrocities become domestic objects, heirlooms passed down alongside the trauma they represent. Mark’s family does not discuss the grandfather. They do not discuss the sister who died. They do not discuss the debt. The silence is the wound.

Park handles this material with more intelligence than the synopsis might suggest. The novel does not reduce the Holocaust to a plot device; it treats it as a real historical horror whose consequences continue to unfold. The intergenerational transmission of trauma, first identified in studies of Holocaust survivors’ children and grandchildren, is the psychological architecture on which the supernatural plot is built. The chicken man is terrifying, but what he represents, the inescapable debt of history, is more terrifying still.

The novel also engages with addiction and self-destruction as trauma responses. Adult Mark’s relationship with alcohol is not decorative. It is central to his character, the mechanism by which he maintains the fiction that none of this happened. Bourbon, therapy, denial: these are the tools he uses to forget, and the novel is clear-eyed about how well they work. The chicken man returns anyway.

Religious symbolism runs throughout. Sister Maria Theresa, the nun who reveals the family’s dark history, sits at the intersection of faith and horror. The ancient Germanic mythology Park draws on, with its demons and dragons and household spirits, exists in tension with the Catholic iconography that appears elsewhere. The result is a world in which multiple supernatural systems overlap uncomfortably, none of them offering much in the way of comfort.

Beneath all of this, there is the fire. The coal seam burning under Dudweiler since the seventeenth century, the mine fire melting snow in Kentucky, the dragon beneath the ground. Fire in this novel is punishment and purification, memory and destruction. It never goes out. That is the point.

Michael Park has been publishing fiction professionally since 2001, but the name “Michael Park” is a relatively recent arrival on horror shelves. He previously published six novels with Tor Books, Sourcebooks, and Orchard Books under other names, including two in bestselling series. An American writer now living in Scotland, where he owns a pub, Park launched his horror career under his own name in 2025 with Fox Point Books. The three novels, Good to Grave, Kentucky Dragon, and The Glass-Face Man, form a loose trilogy connected by the Morris family and by a shared universe of ancient debts, supernatural collectors, and underground fires.

Good to Grave, released in July 2025, introduced Josie Morris, a young woman who signs her soul away to a mysterious megacorporation called Eburos. That novel is a sharp piece of corporate horror, using promotional materials, company handbooks, and bureaucratic absurdity to build a sense of creeping wrongness. Its tone is playful in a dark register; posters remind employees to remove “disciplinary residual limbs” from the fridge, and the term “thrall” is prohibited under company policy. It is horror as satire, and it works.

Kentucky Dragon, published two months later, shifts the register considerably. The prose is leaner, the tone more somber, the historical weight more pronounced. Where Good to Grave uses the absurd to unsettle, Kentucky Dragon uses silence. Both novels share a concern with debt as a form of bondage, but the debt here is ancestral rather than contractual. The Eburos corporation and the chicken man serve different masters, but they are both, in the end, collectors.

The Glass-Face Man, released on the same day as Kentucky Dragon, returns to Josie Morris, now Mark’s daughter, years after her father’s death. It is a more overtly cosmic horror novel, concerned with mass extinction, prophecy, and the return of the dragon. The books are best read as a triptych, each illuminating corners the others leave dark.

Kentucky Dragon belongs, most obviously, to the folk horror revival that has been gathering force over the past decade. The ancient Germanic mythology, the traditional ballad woven through the narrative, the rural Kentucky and German village settings, the sense of old gods demanding old payments: these are all folk horror signatures. But Park does not treat folklore as a decorative resource. He treats it as a living system of belief with real consequences, and that seriousness sets the book apart from more casual appropriations.

The novel also draws on the literary horror tradition. Park’s prose, with its controlled directness and occasional bursts of image, recalls the economy of Stephen King at his most disciplined. The chicken man, as a supernatural debt collector with a specific and unsettling demeanour, shares territory with John Ajvide Lindqvist’s most memorable creations. The European folk-horror sensibility, the ancient thing beneath the ground, the fire that never goes out, all put me in mind of Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s work, particularly Hex. And the way Park weaves historical atrocity into supernatural horror evokes Keith Rosson‘s Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons.

What distinguishes it is the way it grounds the supernatural in a specific, verifiable historical reality. The Brennender Berg, the Burning Mountain in Dudweiler, Germany, is a real place. The coal seam fire has been smouldering there since 1668. Goethe visited it in 1770 and described the sulphurous smell, the glowing rock, the steam rising from crevices, the heat felt through the soles of his shoes. Park takes this real-world wonder and builds a mythology around it. That commitment to anchoring the fantastic in the factual gives the novel a texture that pure invention cannot replicate.

In an era of reckonings with historical injustice, Kentucky Dragon literalises the metaphor: the bill comes due, and it is the children who pay. The novel does not offer easy redemption. It offers the possibility of confrontation, of facing the chicken man and the dragon beneath the ground, and it suggests that this confrontation is the only path forward, even if the outcome is uncertain.

It is violent, intelligent, and unflinching. It knows that some fires cannot be extinguished, only managed, and that the people who start them rarely live to see them put out.

Kentucky Dragon by Michael Park

The chicken man is still walking. He always was. The question this book leaves you with is not whether the debt will be collected, but whether anyone will be left standing when the fire finally reaches the surface.

“Park ably uses religious symbolism, as well as mythical motifs of ancient Germanic people, demons, and even a dragon, in a story that is certainly not for the faint of heart … A twisty, violent tale of a brutal legacy.” – Kirkus Reviews

A demonic debt destroys Mark’s family, until he grows up to face its collector, The Chicken Man.

*“So slowly, slowly she got up,
And slowly she came to him,
And all she said when she came there:
‘Young man, I think you are dying.’”

Barbara Allen, traditional folk song

Mark is eleven years old the first time he meets the chicken man. A thin man with discolored fingernails, the chicken man tells Mark how to make people happy using an icepick and a metal hammer. Tap, tap, tap in through the eyes, until there are no more tears. As the snow in Kentucky melts from a mine fire deep underground, the chicken man collects a brutal debt that leaves Mark traumatized, until, with enough time, bourbon, and therapy, he convinces himself to forget it all.

And he does, for eighteen years.

Until, the chicken man returns. Then, from Kentucky to New York City to a German village, where a coal fire has been burning for three centuries, Mark discovers the dark truth about his family’s debt and the flames that never go out.