The only known living mature
American chestnut stands
at the bottom of a family’s holler.
It survived the blight
the way anything survives:
It keeps a heart.
The Surratts have kept the head of the holler for as long as their burying-ground stones can say. This fall Hazel Surratt is losing her brother the ordinary way — while his daughter Willa, seventeen, grows sweeter, brighter, and harder to hold, the way Hazel’s own sister did forty years ago. The dog won’t cross the wire anymore. The locusts go quiet when Willa does. And the old chestnut at the bottom has begun to choose.
Life asks for everything—the holler don’t ask for nothin’
A Pale Holler is folk horror at the pace of grief, set in a deep holler of the Blue Ridge — where the mountain held what the ice came for, and is holding still.
A family keeps the head of the holler. The holler keeps a heart of the family.
It does not ask. It does not explain. It does not let go.
FALL 2028
It's choosing its next one.
- Format
- Feature screenplay
- Genre
- Folk horror
- Setting
- A holler in the Blue Ridge of southwest Virginia
- Status
- Complete · available on request
- Companion novel
- Complete
Adam J. Spencer writes the dark end of the American pastoral — stories in which a landscape is a character with wants of its own. A Pale Holler is his feature screenplay, developed alongside a completed companion novel of the same story.
Request the screenplay[email protected]