Olyoke

by Vincent Endwell

Olyoke, Tennessee is home to a Dollywood-like theme park, generations of troubled families, and the warnings of a dead architect turned conscripted prophet, who writes of a coming cataclysm.

As the fire nears, DARCY, a Dolly Parton impersonator, finds strange worms in the swamp and feeds them to her dog, who then speaks with the voice of her dead mother. Recently divorced LYLE KNOX is called through its dreams by a strange house, and through its investigation, discovers that Lyle Knox itself is not a person, but a structure. MAGGIE WARNER organizes a theater production to stave off her gnawing misery and becomes convinced that only the people she sees in her dreams are real. Moreover, the Whistler—the man Maggie becomes when she sleeps—welcomes the town’s impending Judgment with open arms.

All destinies converge in Olyoke.

None will escape unchanged.

160 pages, Paperback

Expected publication March 24, 2026

Reviews

[Bookaholic__Reviews · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded to 3, Idk the writing style just didn't do it for me. It didn't feel cohesive and I struggled to stay connected to the story. The only other review right now is a 5* so it could definitely just be a "me problem", so I definitely suggest reading it if the synopsis resonates with you and make your own opinions.

As a native Nashvillian... I saw Dollywood and Dolly Parton who at this point might as well be our patron saint around these parts so I knew regardless of anything else on those grounds alone I had to give this story a chance!

Full RTC

[Dale Stromberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkably rich for such a compact story, Olyoke is a prismatic puzzle-box coyly interfolding the creepy and the melancholy. It unfurls not as a linear story but through episodes (some grisly, some eerie, some heavy with emotion) which feel like rooms in a non-Euclidian house connected by concealed extradimensional corridors. Olyoke is a town where you should never go and might never leave, a swamp of plagues which will infect you into lusting after infection.

[Books For Decaying Millennials · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, thank you to the fine people at Tenebrous Press, for providing a digital ARC of this title. All views and opinions are my own. The following is an excerpt of my full review. Link provided post-text.
-
The late Folk Musician, activist and Folklorist , Utah Phillips (1935-2008) spoke and wrote often about a concept he referred to as “The Long Memory”:

“Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going, but where we want to go.”

Utah spoke of time as an “immense long river”, we all stand in it, are shaped by it. Our lives become part of it. The past is always with us, all you have to do is pause, reach into that river and grab a stone, reach for the the bits of what was, left by those who stood farther up, that great river.:

“... every song they created
And every poem they laid down
Flows down to me
And if I take the time to ask
If I take the time to seek
If I take the time to reach out
I can build that bridge between my world and theirs”

-Utah Phillips “Bridges” from the album “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere”

That great river, time, is almost a character itself, in Vincent Endwell’s OLYOKE. A story, saga, prophecy, a warning. It is told through recollections, news clippings, online web postings, excerpts from books both known and long forgotten. Olyoke, Tennessee, like so many towns just like it, is a place where the forces of the present, of the future, struggle and push against the weight of the past, the force of that long memory. Olyoke brings a sense of being comfortably nestled next to literary places like Spoon River Illinois, and unsettling near the borders of the dread place, Carcosa. The menace, the strangeness, the doom that looms over Olyoke, is like the submerged dangers, in that flow of the long memory, that something in the great river that brushes your leg, as you hunt in the current for a morsel of the past.

... Endwell’s book is rich with echoes of the past. Similar to coming across a scrap book of yellowed clippings and journal entries, whose handwriting is nearly unreadable, yet leaves you pondering what is hinted at, knowing sleep will not find you, when night falls. The flow of the story rings on the mind and senses like some obscure folk tune, recorded to wax cylinder a century ago, then warped remainder heard digitized on archive.org. It is left to the reader to decide to what extent they can detect, the lifeblood, the heartbeat, of that which persists in Olyoke, whose reality moves both with , and the onward flow of times current.
Full review can be read here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/greasyg...

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the fourth book in a row I’ve read with yellow in its cover. Just a funny coincidence, but honestly, the cover for this one really fits. Olyoke is bright, bizarre, and a little blinding in its strangeness.

As we enter Olyoke, we find that it's a strange town filled with strange people connected by very strange things. Most famously known for its Dolly‑Parton‑esque theme park, it also carries a dark, unsettling history that refuses to stay buried.

The residents can feel something coming — something catastrophic, something calamitous, something that's testing the boundaries of place and time. And here we are, being pulled along for the ride, helplessly strapped in as Endwell drags us through this rollercoaster of interconnected stories, dreams, reddit posts, and podcast episodes.

I can’t pretend I understood everything that was happening. The book is weird, tangled, and sometimes hard to follow. But it’s not without its charm, and I never outright hated the experience.

Still, if Olyoke were a real place, it wouldn’t make my travel list. To hell with this town.

[unstable.books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olyoke is a fever dream of Southern gothic creepiness, where spectacle and damnation braid together beneath the glitter of a theme park skyline. Set in a Tennessee town haunted by generational rot and the prophecies of a dead architect, the novella unfolds like a hymn sung slightly off-key. It is beautiful yet deeply unsettling. Endwell populates Olyoke with characters who feel both fractured and mythic. Darcy, a Dolly Parton impersonator, feeds swamp worms (yes they are as horrific as they sound) to her dog and is answered in her dead mothers voice. This is a grotesque miracle that captures the story's obsession with grief and hunger. Lyle Knox's unraveling is particularly striking. He is called by a house that insists he is not a man at all, but a structure and his storyline bends reality in ways that surpass strange and become existential. Meanwhile, Maggie Warner's descent into dreamlike logic and transformation into the Whistler pulses with apocalyptic inevitability. The town itself becomes the true protagonist. It waits and festers. Endwell's prose is strange and theatrical, balancing the absurd and genuine dread. Olyoke is about identity dissolving in the heat and under prophecy. It is bizarre, ambitious and haunting. Thank you Tenebrous Press for sending me an ARC. You can pick up this book when it publishes on March 24th, 2026!