Cave Mountain - by Benjamin Hale (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I've ever read. The original Harper's article gave me the shivers, and this deeper dive is going to have me looking over my shoulder on every hike. Unputdownable." -- Patton Oswalt

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.

Review Quotes

"Like all great books, Benjamin Hale's Cave Mountain is impossible to pigeonhole. It is a thriller full of suspense and surprises and compulsive page-turning. It is a rich cultural history of the Arkansas Ozarks and what it is like to inhabit one of the most remote regions of the country, the clash of isolation and violence in the disappearance of two girls. It is beautifully written and reported--lyrical, sensitive, always eloquent." -- Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights and The Mosquito Bowl

"The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I've ever read. The original Harper's article gave me the shivers, and this deeper dive is going to have me looking over my shoulder on every hike. Unputdownable." -- Patton Oswalt
"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
"The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is an absolute pleasure. . . . [It] announces that Benjamin Hale is himself a fully evolved as a writer, taking on big themes, intent on fitting the world into his work." -- New York Times Book Review on The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
"The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is a brilliant, unruly brute of a book . . . funny, sad and shocking . . . extraordinary intellectual range." -- Washington Post on The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
"A brave and visionary work of genius . . . a noisy, audacious, and promising debut." -- San Francisco Chronicle on The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore