Picture a demon-haunted village, stranded between an impenetrable forest and a sinister cave, into which a stranger rides bearing powers that are hidden even to himself. That’s the setup of S.A. Scarlet’s engrossing fantasy thriller, The Witches’ Hollow.

The novel began in the author’s mind as a series of compelling visuals: “When I write, I usually see something in my head,” Scarlet says. “Hollow started as an idea of a town shrouded in mist, with a huge dead tree. Then I happened to see a photo of a large cave in Italy, up above a town. It was such a striking photo that I imagined someone standing in the cave and just kept thinking more and more about a story connecting those images.”

That vision became Lost Hollow, a small town, isolated from the modern world, with the look of a Renaissance English village and home to a motley group of townsfolk: a tavern-keeper, a baker, a blacksmith, a carpenter—and with the odd mystic and artist thrown in.

Despite its seemingly quaint trappings, the town is full of dread rather than charm. At night, it’s lit by the sullen glow from Witches’ Hollow, a cavern from which no one who enters ever returns. Piercing, red eyes peer into windows from the foggy darkness. There are no witches in Witches’ Hollow—but there is worse; the inhabitants whisper about the machinations of a mysterious collector of rare artifacts named L.A. Calesanti, and they’re careful not to stray into the surrounding forest, where the Morrowen, a man-eating monster, lurks amid piles of human bones.

Into this pressure cooker comes Arthur Montesque, an alcoholic former detective living in a rat-infested apartment in a nameless city. Calesanti hires him, sight unseen, to travel to Lost Hollow in a stretch limo, on foot, and on horseback to look for Calesanti’s employee, who disappeared while searching for a relic of the artist Michelangelo.

Arthur’s investigation provides a loose frame for the story, allowing the detective not only to probe Lost Hollow, but also his own nature. “Arthur was hiding away from himself in the modern, outside world,” says Scarlet. “I wanted to put him in a situation where modernity gets taken away to the point that he doesn’t have anything to focus on except himself. He starts coming to terms with who he is, becoming a more basic version of himself.”

One version is a tough, daring private eye. Arthur narrowly escapes the Morrowen, manhandles menacing louts, imbibes tavern-keeper Vanessa’s strangely heady drinks to steady his alcoholic tremors, and then heads upstairs with the woman for the first of many graphic sexual marathons that he undertakes with various lovely villagers over the course of the novel.

But there’s another, darker, occult reality underlying Lost Hollow, which emerges in nightmares. In Arthur’s troubled dreams, he sees women with horns and red eyes, emanates surges of energy, travels back to the scene of a tragic fire that left him scarred by guilt, and finds an enigmatic book about the Archangel Michael. The other villagers endure even more terrifying visions during their slumbers, in which the Mephistophelean Calesanti inflicts sadistic horrors on those who disobey him in waking life, leaving them cowed and spiritually crippled.

The result is a yarn that’s eerie, atmospheric, and richly imagined. “When I’m thinking of stories, it’s almost like I see a movie in my head and I’m just watching it happen,” Scarlet says, and critics concur. The author’s vivid prosehas won the novel raves, with Kirkus Reviews calling it “a complex and intensely cinematic fantasy.” It’s filled with arresting visuals that amp up the drama like Technicolor on the page, as when Rose, the village dressmaker, dreams of being swarmed by spiders: 

They now filled the floor, except for a small semicircle around her, and she could hear their rustling, see their legs writhing about, creating a horrific sea of grotesque movement….She landed on her back, felt fat bodies deflate as their life fluids squirted out beneath her. Instantly, she felt them climb onto her legs, biting, felt tentative touches at her ears, and she bolted upright. She then felt one scrambling up her legs, felt it trying to burrow under her dress, and she shot to her feet in horror, sending it tumbling back to the floor below. 

Tangled up in the story’s shock effects, explicit sex, and supernaturalism are other motifs, reminiscent of Arthurian romance and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which give it a mythic resonance. “I’ve paired two things that are usually opposed to one another, because the book has both erotic elements and religious elements,” Scarlet observes. As Arthur discovers more about his own origins, and those of Calesanti and Lost Hollow’s denizens, the novel plays out themes of sin and redemption on a grand scale—with the prospect of hell erupting on Earth as a terrifying possibility.

Yet even when the stakes seem cosmic, The Witches’ Hollow remains a psychological novel at heart. “I really think of the book as ordinary contemporary fiction even though it has fantastical elements,” says Scarlet. Even when Lost Hollow’s inhabitants take on a seemingly demonic guise, they retain their human feelings and weaknesses. Their fates hinge on the ordinary workings of guilt and gratitude and hope and on summoning courage in the face of unbearable torment.

Scarlet intends The Witches’ Hollow as a one-off story, although future novels may share its fictive universe and a character or two. The next one, the author says, should be ready in two years, and readers can expect another rousing tale of an alternate realism replete with flashes of magic—and with genuine sorcerers, Scarlet chuckles: “The next one, I promise, will have witches in it.”

 Will Green is a writer in New York.