In this tense, atmospheric novel where shadows flit across each page, Laura Creedle unfolds a story about legends, paranoia, and the horror that hides just below the surface. A must-read for fans of Rory Power and Cheryl Isaacs!
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Laura Creedle’s The Deep Well, which is out now.
When April Fischer was five, the voice from the well told her to fly.
Ever since April survived the strange and brutal massacre at the Copperton mine twelve years ago, she has been in the spotlight. At first, as the subject of internet urban legend. Then, as a horror movie inspiration. And most frighteningly, as the darling of a cult that believes that on her seventeenth birthday she will come into universe-altering power.
April has unanswered questions about what really went down at the mine—most of all, what happened to her father, the foreman on the drill site, who disappeared on that day. Until the week before her birthday, when she is given a collection of documents and the words He’s alive.
As April uncovers more about her childhood at the mine, the cultists’ beliefs don’t feel as impossible as she once thought, and she begins to hope that she truly can bring her father back. But even though she never wants to go near the edge of the open-pit mine again, there are forces in Copperton who want to see her fail . . . or watch her fly.
APRIL WAS THIRTEEN when the movie about her life came out. Hellhole!
It was originally called The Bicycle Girl, but that name suggested an art film three thousand people would see, not the summer sleeper horror hit the studio hoped for. So the movie was subsequently retitled.
In the movie, creepy five-year-old Bicycle Girl wanted to release all the demons from Hell. There was no drill site, and no King Steenkampf, but there were teenagers. Eight of them to be exact. One of them, her imaginary older sister, Kendall, was the hero of the story. She realized early on that April was possessed by a water demon called Voidan. Kendall heard the voice. She was the only one besides Bicycle Girl who knew about the voice.
April’s story was moved from New Mexico to New England. The open-pit mine was changed to a quarry lake. All the local high school students swam in the lake, and the demon killed them one by one, while she stood on the edge of the cliff laughing maniacally at each death, her eyes glowing red. The movie version of April was named July.
In the movie, her house was perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the lake. Sometimes, she would get on her bike and ride toward the cliff, and Kendall would stop her. Even though her movie parents worried about this behavior, neither of them thought to put up a fence.
The movie ended on Kendall’s seventeenth birthday. July locked Kendall into a closet, went into the kitchen, and killed both her useless parents, splattering Kendall’s oversize, gleaming white birthday cake with their blood.
As Bicycle Girl began her inevitable ride toward the cliff, Kendall made a harrowing escape through the attic and out a dormer window. She stepped onto the roof in time to see July ride her bike in slow motion toward the edge of the quarry. Kendall scrambled down a convenient trellis and grabbed July the moment before her bike plunged over the edge.
April, the real April, wished that the movie had ended right there.
It hadn’t.
Having saved July, Kendall’s eyes rolled back into her head, and the voice of Voidan she’d been hearing became louder and louder until it overwhelmed her.
Kendall had always been the harbinger, the bringer of the end-times. July was just a red herring.
Kendall walked to the edge of the cliff and jumped.
The entire lake turned into a steaming volcano, spewing hot water, molten rock, and demons clawing their way to the surface from Hell. And Kendall, the most frightening demon of all.
The end.
Like a lot of movies based on urban legends, it was terrible. It was Slender Man bad, 15 percent on Rotten Tomatoes bad.
That didn’t matter.
Right after the title credits, after a fade to black, came the words “Based on a true story.”
Based on a true story doesn’t mean anything other than you read something on the internet, and it gave you an idea for something else entirely, but a lot of people thought the whole story was true. You would think a water volcano spewing a steady stream of demons over a New England town and thereby bringing on the end of days would have gone viral.
It wasn’t long before people online began to bombard April with questions about her plans to destroy the world. Some thought it was funny. Some people really thought she was possessed. Those people were—mean. She had no idea how mean people could be until that moment.
The movie came out in the summer. April didn’t want to go back to school in the fall, but at least she had friends. She spent that summer hanging out with her then–best friends, Jessica and Emma. Most of that summer they spent in the woods across from Zach’s house. There was an abandoned couch there and Zach had built a bike trail with ramps for doing tricks. The whole group—Diego, Ramsey, Emma, Jessica—spent a lot of time playing two truths and a lie. That turned out to be April’s undoing. During one of these games, Emma took a video of April laughing in a slightly devious way.
Emma posted it online as “the real Bicycle Girl.” People knew April had been present at the Ojo de Cristo massacre, but until then, few had connected the massacre to the movie. Thanks to Emma, the whole world learned that April was the inspiration for Bicycle Girl in the movie.
It blew up in a minor way and the conspiracy theorists found her.
Jessica had been April’s best friend, but she sided with Emma. Jessica told April that she was awkward and self-absorbed and couldn’t take a joke.
April was thirteen.
She realized then they weren’t her friends.
Friday afternoon. There was a home football game, which meant that school would end early and there would be a pep rally.
It was a week until her seventeenth birthday and the possible end of the world.
April would have liked to put the end of the world out of her mind, but that was hard to do with all the red paint smeared on her locker. Someone had painted a very primitive, messy, seven-pointed star there.
People streamed past, craning their necks, avoiding eye contact. No one wanted to have anything to do with her this close to the apocalypse.
“Well, this is new,” she said to no one in particular.
Over the years, her locker had undergone repeated assaults of graffiti in Sharpie and small, abusive notes pushed through the gills. Most of it had been reassuringly unoriginal and badly spelled, but this was next level. She’d never seen this seven-pointed star before. It had a strange, sprawled stick figure in the middle of the star attached to an arrow pointing down, suggesting free fall.
Did this have to do with the Deep Well cult?
The thought of the cult made the breath catch in her throat. She swiveled, scanned the hallway, halfway expecting to see an ominous, hooded figure holding a paintbrush, leering at her.
No one was there.
The massacre at the mine happened on April’s fifth birthday. Nineteen people were killed, including her dad. King Steenkampf, the owner of the mine, disappeared amid the chaos. According to the Deep Well cultists, April opened a portal on that day, and King Steenkampf stepped through. Now they were expecting her to open the portal again on her seventeenth birthday to bring King Steenkampf back.
April never really understood why the cultists wanted him back so badly. Something about King returning to usher in a golden age. She didn’t care what the cultists wanted, because no way in hell was she going out to the mine to perform some weird ritual sacrifice and a summoning. Not on her birthday. Not ever.
She imagined some of the cult members were already in town for her upcoming birthday. It was possible this star was a message for her.
She’d skulked in the Deep Well corner of Reddit years before, but she’d never seen anything like this seven-pointed star. It was probably just some dumb meme she didn’t know about, unrelated to the cult. She forced a calming breath and turned back to her locker.
April had her purse and her phone. She knew better than to leave anything important in her locker. Not in a world of superglue and red paint. And worse.
“I’ll just let you dry.”
She wondered in a fairly uninterested way if the geography textbook inside her locker was covered in red paint. It wouldn’t be the first time a textbook suffered due to her curse.
She decided to skip the full-time joy of the Copperton High School pep rally and grab her sister, Jules, from middle school, but since her car was parked in the back lot near the gym, contact with sports-related enthusiasm was unavoidable. Maybe she could crush some hopes and dreams on the way out of school. Throw a few dark, well-deserved glances in the right direction.
Outside the gym there was a huge Go Big Red banner, red paint dripping off the G and the B like bloodstains dripping down a wall.
Like paint dripping down her locker.
April stopped dead in front of the banner.
She stood a distance away, her hand on her chin in a gesture of appreciative contemplation. Thinking about whether the paint on the banner matched the paint on her locker.
Jessica sidled up next to April, a head shorter, her dark hair held in Harley Quinn pigtails with red bows that matched her cheerleading outfit. Jessica stood close to April as though her subconscious had still not made peace with the fact that they weren’t friends anymore. April resisted the urge to give her shoulder a playful nudge. Old habits die hard.
“Is this your handiwork?” April asked. Jessica grimaced.
“We didn’t have keys to the supply room until the end of lunch. We didn’t have time to let it dry. You know I can do better when I have the time,” Jessica said, frowning.
“Oh, I know,” April said.
She glared at Jessica, looking for a tell. Some quick, guilty cutting of the eyes or a small knowing smirk.
Nothing.
And in a way, that made April—what was the word for it?—happy. She missed Jessica. They’d been friends from first grade when they spent a lot of time in the kind of crafts that require microfine glitter. Jessica had an eye for color and when April’s glitter jar turned muddy, Jessica gave her the one she’d made, green and gold and just enough black to add depth. It shouldn’t have worked, but when you turned it over, it was pure Emerald City.
April still had it.
This was in the BH time—before Hellhole!
Emma appeared out of nowhere at Jessica’s side, her shoulders squared and touching Jessica’s as though they were in the initial stage of forming a phalanx to defend against invaders. April supposed that was what cheerleading was—a form of military training.
“Are you complaining about our sign?” Emma said, pert chin thrust forward.
April glanced down at Emma’s hands. A telltale splotch of red paint on her right hand.
“Not at all,” April replied. “I think it’s delightfully creepy.”
“You would,” Emma said.
And there it was—the small smirk that said Emma had painted the star on April’s locker and she was not sorry about it. Not at all.
Excerpt from The Deep Well Copyright © 2025 by Laura Creedle. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
