"For two generations, the rural hill town of Grendel, Kentucky has honored its Faustian bargain with the monster living in its abandoned coal mine: a human sacrifice every season in return for agrarian prosperity the likes of which this rocky region had never before seen (including its greatest cash crop: the dankest weed in the land). When one town elder breaks this pact, Grendel's only hope is that its prodigal daughter will return home to face...