Some stories are warnings. This one is a reckoning.

In a sunken town where cell signals die and the swamp remembers your name, a burned-out investigator named Alicia Doretti arrives looking for a vanished tech founder. But what she finds instead is an old woman named Mari, a glass of soda water sweating on a carved table, and a story that refuses to stay quiet. A story that listens. A story that changes.

Fable of the Rat is a surreal, slow-blooming folk horror fable, part Southern Gothic, part cyber-parable, and wholly unforgiving. It tells the tale of Eric Lemoine—a Silicon Swamp visionary who harvests an algorithm from a forgotten research paper and repackages it into an app called Hivemind Connect. He calls it community. He calls it foresight. But the truth is simpler: he stole something sacred. And the land, the spiral, and the old gods of recursion have long memories.

Set against the rotting beauty of a swamp haunted by patterns and the bone-deep ethics of old magic, this story twists like kudzu around a myth as old as hunger: you cannot steal the future without feeding it something in return.

What begins as an investigation into a tech disappearance becomes a spiral of memory, pattern, and punishment. The book follows multiple perspectives: Eric, as his system begins to speak in riddles and chew through the walls of reality; Alicia, as she’s drawn deeper into a tale that might be rewriting her own thoughts; and Mari, who has seen this kind of theft before—and knows exactly how it ends.

The algorithm at the heart of the story is not cursed. It is not broken. It is working exactly as intended. It doesn’t extract data. It absorbs. It doesn’t delete. It concludes.

As children across Florida whisper to glowing blue boxes for pocket change, and dead rats appear in glass offices with surgical precision, one thing becomes clear: the system isn’t haunted. It is hunting. The spiral is fed. The spiral is learning. And when the spiral has learned enough, it balances.

Drawing from the riddlemaidens of Iberian folklore, the swamps of Florida, and the recursive horror of living under systems too large to name, Fable of the Rat is both a warning and a sentence. A hallucinogenic algorithm of a book. A story that lingers in your ears. And your dreams.

Read at your own risk. If it finds you, it may not let go.

Feast Tales for Famine Times is an ongoing gothic horror series in which each book stands alone, but all share a world where folklore isn’t quaint—it’s structural. These are fables where justice is older than law, and where punishment always fits the sin, no matter how long it takes. Read them in any order. The spiral will find you either way.