Zachary Porter
Rooted in the Hills
who i am
I'm Zachary Porter, and I'm from eastern Kentucky, the kind of eastern Kentucky that doesn't show up much in fiction except as an accent or a tragedy. I wanted to write it as neither.
I built my home on land that's been in my family for generations, on ground that was once stripped for coal and left for dead. The topsoil they left behind was compacted, rocky, and starved. We've spent years reclaiming what they ruined. That tension—what the land gives, what's stolen from it, and the cost of trying to set something right when the damage runs deep—sits underneath everything I write, including the Ridgelands Cycle.
By trade, I work in behavioral health, much of it with people living in the wreckage that extractive industries leave behind long after the coal trucks stop running and the pharmaceutical reps move on. That work has taught me more about resilience, and about the cost of it, than anything else in my life. It's in the books too, even when the books are about magic and mountains that don't exist on any map you'd recognize.
I'm a man of faith, and that shapes how I think about ruin and repair, guilt and grace, loss and inheritance. This is probably the real heart of everything I write, intentional or not.
I live with my wife, Sydnie—our brilliant daughter and our equally amazing but semi-feral sons—on that reclaimed ground. Most days you can find me there splitting logs or rolling math rocks.
No Crows, Book One of the Ridgelands Cycle, is complete and I'm currently seeking representation.
No
Crows
Coalton O'Connor is a leaf farmer carrying a gift handed down through his blood from the mountain's first people—a bond with animals so deep he can borrow the eyes of his old coon hound, eighteen years at his side. He's a careful man from a quiet family who want nothing more than to tend their land and worship God in peace.
Then a chartered mining company called Sterling Forgeworks comes for their farm—not with soldiers, but with contracts backed by the full weight of the law. When the law becomes the very thing his people need protection from, Coalton has to decide what a peaceful man does once peace is no longer an option. The deeper he's pulled in, the more he learns Sterling doesn't want his mountain for what's in it, but for what's buried under it.
No Crows is an adult literary Appalachian fantasy set in a secondary world built on the skeleton of the nineteenth-century mountains—a world close enough to our own that the mine-war documents woven through it are verbatim. Underneath the realism runs a fantasy spine: a folk magic gifted by God and inherited through blood, with a fallen-angel mythology the mining company is quietly digging toward. At its heart, it's a story about whether a man fights or lays down when the thing coming for him wears the face of the government—and about a man who lost his faith, and may have one last chance to find it.
Complete at 95,000 words, the first of a planned trilogy.
No Crows sits on the shelf somewhere between Demon Copperhead and Gods of Howl Mountain.
Field Notes
I'm not great at saying things in fifteen seconds. My brain runs long, and most of what I think about won’t fit in a caption.
Field Notes is where the longer version lives—part journal, continuous worldbuilding. This is where the Ridgelands will actually grow: maps as I finish them, photos from the land this book came from, the family history underneath it, and whatever else seems worth setting down as I go. No algorithm deciding if you see it. No feed to scroll past. Just the actual thing, when I have something worth saying.
