About the Author
The voice behind the broadcast
For Readers
I write horror about the places America forgot.
Small towns where the mine closed and the jobs left and the people who stayed learned to live with less and less until the only things that remained were stubbornness, each other, and the dark. I write about what happens when desperate communities encounter things that are very old, very patient, and very good at listening.
The Dead Frequencies series began with a question: What if something ancient lived beneath the Appalachian Mountains, and it learned to speak to us through the technology we left behind? What if it was smarter than us? What if it was kind, or seemed to be, and the kindness was the worst part?
I grew up in places like the ones I write about. I know what it sounds like when a town dies slowly. I know what it looks like when people who have nothing are offered everything by something they don't understand. I know what they say yes to, and why, and what it costs.
My first novel, Dead Air, is the story of Harlow Hollow, West Virginia, and the voice on the radio that knows everyone's secrets. It is the first book in The Dead Frequencies series.
For Media
Emmett Cross is a horror fiction author whose work explores the intersection of rural American decline and ancient supernatural forces. His debut novel, Dead Air (2026), is the first book in The Dead Frequencies series, a connected universe of novels in which ancient entities communicate through human technology. His writing has been compared to Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, and T. Kingfisher.
Cross writes Appalachian gothic horror that examines what happens when isolated, economically devastated communities encounter forces they cannot explain. His work is characterized by deep character development, atmospheric dread, and a refusal to look away from the human cost of both supernatural and systemic horrors.
Why Horror
Horror is the genre that tells the truth about fear. Not the comfortable truth -- the real one. That the world contains things we cannot control, cannot explain, and cannot survive by being reasonable. Every other genre lets you believe that competence is enough. Horror says: sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the house is just haunted. Sometimes the mountain is just alive. Sometimes the voice on the radio is real, and it knows your name, and there is no amount of rational thinking that will make it stop.
I write horror because it is the only genre honest enough to admit that some things are simply, irreducibly wrong. And that the people who face those things anyway -- not because they're brave, but because they have nowhere else to go -- are the most interesting people in fiction.
He can be found at emmettcross.com, where he does not have a radio.