Cave Mountain - by Benjamin Hale (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"The damnedest 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

"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

"[Hale's] Arkansas roots make him the perfect narrator for this riveting, eye-popping tale. . . . Like a savvy tour guide, he spouts detail-rich prose brimming with intriguing asides, twists, turns and reflections, giving readers up-close-and-personal insights along with thoughtful analysis of personalities and events. . . . Hale's efforts to deeply engage with his subjects bring to mind Beth Macy's empathetic, probing Paper Girl. . . . Cave Mountain is an intimate, deeply original, true crime narrative reminiscent of Caroline Fraser's Murderland." - BookPage

"A book of rabbit holes: fascinating, maddening, maundering, and often electrifying . . . . Goose pimples become hard to suppress." - Garden & Gun

"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

"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 damnedest 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