PRESS RELEASE:  Irving's Ghost Press, June 2026

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Bones is a dark, revisionist Gothic novel that reimagines the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by shifting the center of the story away from Ichabod Crane and onto Brom Bones, transforming Brom from a swaggering prankster into a violent, morally ruined man haunted by the consequences of his own cruelty. The story opens with the disappearance of Ichabod Crane, which the people of Sleepy Hollow quickly and conveniently attribute to the Headless Horseman after finding a ruined saddle, a smashed pumpkin, and Crane’s tattered hat near the bridge by the church. But the novel reveals that the truth is far uglier—Brom, disguised as the Horseman, meant only to terrify Ichabod and drive him away, but his prank turns fatal when the pumpkin he hurls strikes Ichabod and kills him. Rather than confess or seek help, Brom buries the body in secret and allows the village to turn folklore into fact.

 

Years later, the crime has not stayed buried. Aucker Van Acker, a poor, frightened boy who secretly witnessed Brom burying what he believed was Ichabod’s corpse, has grown up carrying the psychological burden of what he saw. His silence has cost him dearly, filling his life with nightmares, guilt, and a sense that the dead demand justice. At the same time, Brom’s own life has curdled into disappointment. He is trapped in a bitter, loveless marriage to Katrina, struggling financially, raising children he resents, and discovering that winning the woman he once desired has brought him neither status nor happiness. As a series of increasingly strange and humiliating incidents begin to target him—phantom voices, sabotaged property, vanishing livestock, threatening pranks, and signs that someone knows exactly what he did—Brom becomes consumed by paranoia. The novel builds its suspense around whether he is being stalked by a living avenger, haunted by supernatural retribution, or simply destroyed by the fear and guilt he has spent years refusing to acknowledge.

 

At its core, Bones is a psychological Gothic tale about buried violence and the impossibility of escaping one’s own sins. It uses the familiar mythology of Sleepy Hollow to tell a much darker story about class, power, marriage, cowardice, and the corrosive force of denial. Brom’s attempt to control the narrative of Ichabod’s death ultimately collapses as the truth presses back in on him from every side, and the novel’s atmosphere of dread comes from the sense that folklore, memory, and guilt are all conspiring to expose what the town chose not to see.