Dive into realms of R.E. Smith, author. Where stories are forged from history and imagination.
Explore the Works of
R.E. Smith Author
Where I leave my Stories
The Hollow Kingdom: A Ten-Book Series
Some kingdoms are built on crowns.
This one was buried under roads, bells, graves, records, and every name the Crown decided was easier to forget.
Tressa Vale is a Crown Works surveyor, trained to measure roads, boundaries, and official lies. When the road to Bellharrow grows seven impossible miles overnight, she follows it into a village where old bells are waking under the ground and a throne waits beneath the world with no ruler sitting on it.
Then Garran Holt arrives.
A dangerous Warden with fire in his blood and scars he does not explain, Holt was sent to contain what the Crown fears. Tressa was sent to measure it. Neither expected the road to claim them both.
What begins with one wrong road becomes a fight for the soul of a hidden kingdom. Ancient bells answer. Buried roads open. The dead demand witness. Children stolen by law speak from sealed places. Dragons wake across wounded seasons. Courts, churches, offices, claimants, and monsters all reach for power, but Tressa learns the hardest truth of all:
A kingdom does not have to be ruled to be real.
Across ten books, **The Hollow Kingdom** follows Tressa, Holt, and a fierce circle of allies through haunted roads, forbidden claims, buried law, dangerous magic, slow-burn desire, brutal choices, and a love strong enough to refuse every throne that asks for blood.
This is dark romantasy with teeth: gothic mystery, ancient magic, found family, sharp banter, political danger, haunted villages, impossible roads, and a romance forged in fire, witness, and war.
For readers who love fantasy romance with rich worldbuilding, fierce heroines, scarred protectors, buried kingdoms, ancient bargains, and slow-burning passion wrapped around epic stakes.
The road to Bellharrow was only the beginning.
The throne is empty.
And that may be the only reason the kingdom can survive.
Fugate: The Blood of Troublesome Creek
In the hills of Kentucky, some bloodlines do not fade.
They wait.
Sixteen-year-old Elias Fugate has always known he is different. His skin carries the strange blue cast of his family line, a mark that makes neighbors stare, children whisper, and churchgoers look away before crossing themselves in silence.
In Troublesome Creek, everyone has an explanation.
God’s mark.
Bad blood.
Mountain sickness.
Sin.
But nobody has the truth.
When Elias starts asking why there are no other blue children his age, the answers turn dangerous. His father dodges the past with half-truths. His grandfather keeps records that should have been burned. The elders watch him like something promised has finally come due.
And the deeper Elias digs into his family’s history, the more he begins to understand that the blue is not just a color.
It is an inheritance.
Inspired by the real legend of the Blue People of Kentucky, Fugate: The Blood of Troublesome Creek is a dark Appalachian gothic novel of family secrets, buried sins, mountain folklore, and one boy’s fight to learn what his bloodline has been hiding for generations.
Some families leave behind land.
Some leave behind names.
The Fugates left behind something waiting in the dark.
Ravenscar: The Black Wake
A dead ship drifts into Stonegate at dawn.
No crew. No sound. No gulls circling above it.
Only a black star burned through its sail, a dragon scale waiting in the captain’s cabin, and a warning carved into wood:
Do not let it hear bells.
Captain Morwen Ravenscar has survived war, fire, grief, and the kind of loss that leaves teeth marks on the soul. Stonegate is still rebuilding from the Black Roar, and Morwen wants nothing more than to keep her harbor alive, her crew sharp, and royal clerks as far from her desk as possible.
Then the dead ship arrives.
Inside its hold is a ruined survivor with white eyes, broken hands, and a message from beyond every honest map. West of the Shatterchain, beneath waters sailors were never meant to cross, something ancient is waking. It knows the boy king. It knows the blood that answers fire. And it is listening.
To stop it, Morwen must take the Nailwife and sail into the Black Wake, a cursed road of dark water, old names, drowned bells, and things that remember the taste of men. Every mile west carries the crew farther from safety and closer to a truth the sea has buried for generations.
Some voyages are made for gold.
Some are made for glory.
This one is made because something hungry has found its way home, and Morwen Ravenscar is the last kind of woman any monster should invite to war.
Ravenscar: The Black Wake is a dark nautical fantasy of grief, loyalty, sacrifice, dragons, ancient powers, and the price paid by those who stand between the living world and the deep.
Timeless Love: The Wrath
Some love stories end in death. Some refuse to end at all.
Long before Harrow House became a grand hotel, before its halls filled with music, wealth, and whispered rumors, the land belonged to blood, fire, grief, and an ancient oak that remembered everything.
In 1880, surveyors stumble upon something buried in the storm-soaked woods near the Atlantic coast. What they awaken is not simply a ghost, and not simply a curse. It is the wrath of a man who died protecting the woman he loved and the child they would never hold.
Centuries earlier, Mattanaw and Awenasa built a life together in a coastal village where love grew beside hardship, family, and survival. But when violence tore through their world, their final moments were driven into the heart of an oak tree, leaving behind a wound that time could not close.
Years later, Harrow House rises over that same ground.
At first it is a marvel. A hotel of marble floors, polished rooms, grand staircases, and ocean views. But beneath the beauty, something waits. Guests hear crying in empty rooms. Shadows move where no living person stands. The woman in white appears with sorrow in her eyes. And somewhere inside the walls, a dead husband’s rage still walks.
When Rene and her son Daren are drawn into the secrets of Harrow House, they uncover a haunting born not from evil, but from love twisted by grief. To survive, they must face the truth buried beneath the hotel, the spearhead hidden in the old oak, and the wrath that has guarded a murdered family for generations.
Timeless Love: The Wrath is a supernatural horror novel about grief, family, vengeance, and the terrifying power of love when death cannot silence it. Dark, emotional, and haunting, it asks one chilling question:
What would love become if it never let go?
The Bone Crown: The Hollow King Saga
The Bone Crown
Old Bell was opened wide enough to climb inside.
When Garran Vale finds one of his cows gutted in the rain, carved with a message meant for him, he knows the old warnings about King’s Cairn were never just stories. Something under the hill has awakened. Something ancient. Something hungry. And it has taken interest in his grandson, Bram.
The trouble begins with a child’s discovery: a black piece of bone washed out of the earth after a storm. To Bram, it looks like treasure. To the thing beneath King’s Cairn, it is the first tooth of a broken crown.
Now the Vale family is being hunted by old magic, dead things, faceless men, drowned bells, false kings, and the buried will of the Hollow King himself. Every road they take pulls them deeper into a past their bloodline was meant to guard, and every piece of the Bone Crown they recover brings them closer to the one place they should never return.
King’s Cairn.
Garran is no king. He is an old soldier, a farmer, a widower, and a stubborn man with bad knees and too many regrets. But when the dark reaches for his family, he does what hard men have always done. He stands in the way.
Dark, gritty, and built on family, sacrifice, old grief, and buried evil, The Bone Crown is a grim fantasy novel for readers who like their magic ancient, their heroes weathered, and their monsters patient.
Because some prisons are not made to keep evil out.
Some are made to keep it waiting.
Now Available: The Woods
Briar Falls is the kind of town where everyone knows your name, your business, and the version of yourself you work hardest to protect.
It has clean streets, quiet neighborhoods, little league games, country-club drinks, old grudges, strained marriages, and the kind of small cruelties people pretend not to notice. At the edge of it all stand the woods.
They have always been there.
Patient. Silent. Waiting.
For generations, people in Briar Falls have told stories about those trees. People disappear. Others come back changed. Most folks dismiss the old warnings as superstition, the sort of thing small towns whisper to make ordinary life feel larger than it is.
Then Gary Carter falls into a hidden pit while searching for his dog.
In pain, alone, and terrified he may die there, Gary hears something impossible. A voice. A thought. A bargain.
He doesn’t have to stay.
Someone else can.
All he has to do is choose a name.
What begins as one desperate act of survival soon spreads through Briar Falls like rot beneath fresh paint. Gary’s neighbor Paul falls mysteriously ill. Carla Mendoza enters the woods after a bitter confrontation and returns to find another woman suffering. One by one, the people of Briar Falls discover the same terrible pattern: pain can be passed on, suffering can be traded, and the woods are always listening.
But every bargain leaves a mark.
As fear turns to guilt and guilt turns to obsession, a handful of ordinary people begin to believe they have uncovered the truth. The woods are not killing at random. They are choosing. Trading. Demanding balance. And if the sickness spreading through town is ever going to stop, the survivors may have to offer something far worse than a name.
Led by Lena Cross, whose search for answers becomes more dangerous with every revelation, the group is drawn toward an unthinkable conclusion: the woods may require an ultimate sacrifice.
But horror does not always announce itself with monsters.
Sometimes it grows in whispered blame, old resentment, panic, grief, and the human need to make suffering mean something. Sometimes the darkest thing in the trees is not what waits there, but what people carry in with them.
The Woods is a slow-burn supernatural horror novel about fear, guilt, survival, and the terrible bargains people make when they believe they have no other choice. It is a story of a town haunted by its own secrets, where every path into the trees leads deeper into the question no one wants to answer:
What would you do if your life could be saved by giving the pain to someone else?
More Stories
ROMANTIC
No Disappearing:
A Second-Chance
No Disappearing: A Second-Chance is a love story about what happens after the big goodbye—when the person you swore you were done with shows up again, looking familiar… and dangerous in the quiet way.
Mara didn’t leave because she stopped loving him. She left because love wasn’t enough to keep two people from burning each other down. She rebuilt her life the old-fashioned way: one day at a time, one hard boundary at a time, one “I’m fine” at a time—until “fine” almost started to feel real.
Then he comes back.
Not with grand speeches or movie apologies. With the kind of presence that makes the room tilt. With unfinished sentences, old jokes that still land, and the same gravity that once pulled her under. The past starts breathing again—through friends who remember too much, family who wants answers, and a town that watches like it’s free theater.
Because this isn’t just about whether they still want each other.
It’s about whether they can face what broke them without using it as a weapon. Whether the truth can finally be said out loud. Whether two people can learn a new way to love—without disappearing when it gets hard.
Tense, tender, and uncomfortably honest, No Disappearing is a second-chance romance for readers who like their chemistry sharp, their emotions earned, and their happily-ever-after fought for.
Perfect for fans of:
second-chance romance
forced proximity / stuck together vibes
sharp dialogue + slow-burn heat
messy history, real healing, real payoff
Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t coming back.
It’s staying.
FANTASY
Crown of Cinders
(3 book series)
In Kethria, a crown isn’t a symbol. It’s a sentence.
CROWN OF CINDERS is a dark epic fantasy series where thrones are bought with blood, peace is negotiated with daggers, and dragons don’t serve—they decide. When an ancient city of stone and smoke begins to crack under rebellion, betrayal, and old magic waking hungry, the people learn the oldest law of power: the city always collects what it’s owed.
At the center of the storm is Sable—a survivor forged into something sharper than mercy—pulled into the kind of war that doesn’t end when the battles stop. Because after the fires come the treaties… and treaties are where empires rot. Beside her moves Rook Calver, a man built for the shadows, hunting truths that kings bury and courts pretend never existed. Together they navigate a realm where every alliance has teeth, every victory leaves a stain, and the dead don’t stay quiet when the ashes are deep enough.
Across the series, armies march, crowns fall, and the line between justice and vengeance blurs until it’s nothing but smoke. The stakes rise from city streets to royal chambers to the skies themselves —where dragonfire writes the final word.
If you like grimdark politics, ruthless characters, and high-fantasy spectacle with real consequences, this series will drag you through the embers and dare you to call it salvation.
The City Owes Blood. And it always pays.
FICTION
My Legacy:
From Conquest to Cradle, From Ashes to Hope, Fourteen Generations Across the Waters of Time.
My Legacy is a journey through four centuries of one Rhode Island family whose roots reach back to the very founding of the colony itself. From the exile of Roger Williams in 1635 to the mill towns of Manville and the quiet streets of modern America, this book follows the steady, unbroken line of the Smiths—millers, soldiers, farmers, builders, mothers, teachers, and dreamers.
Told with the tenderness of memory and the grit of lived experience, the story begins in a house filled with generations, where a young boy asks his grandfather what their nationality is and receives an answer that will shape his entire understanding of identity: We’re Rhode Islanders. From that moment forward, the past becomes a calling.
Through richly woven narrative, ancestral records, imagined-but-true vignettes, and reverent portraits of men and women long gone, My Legacy traces the Smith family from 1600s Providence through war, migration, industry, and change. Each chapter reveals the people behind the names—Warren the blacksmith-poet, Hattie the lantern of the home, Nicholas the wheelwright, Angeline the teacher, Edward the quiet patriot, Kenneth the soldier who came home and built peace, and the modern descendants who carry that light forward.
What emerges is not just genealogy, but a living testament to resilience, belonging, and the sacred weight of family. The book closes in the present day, where grandchildren run beneath Florida pines carrying the same fire that once warmed colonial hearths, mill floors, and frontier cabins.
Part history, part memoir, part love letter to blood and soil, My Legacy is a tribute to the people who built a family strong enough to withstand centuries—and tender enough to remain unforgettable.
In these pages, the past is not gone. It is alive, speaking through the voices of those who lived, loved, fought, worked, and handed their stories forward. This is the Smith lineage—rooted, weathered, and unbreakable.
HORROR
The Ghost of Chipola : Debt Crossing
In the backwoods of early-1800s Marianna, Florida, a new crossing over the Chipola River is supposed to mean progress—shorter rides, fuller markets, a town finally stepping out of the mud.
Then an old moonshiner is murdered the day after the bridge opens.
And the dead man doesn’t leave.
He can’t lift a hand or swing a blade—so he does what spiteful ghosts do best: he haunts. He appears in the wrong place at the wrong time, whispers into the dark, spooks horses, bends crowds, and turns ordinary fear into deadly motion. One death becomes another. A headless driver. A hunter thrown hard. A town slowly learning that the bridge doesn’t just carry people across water—it carries debt.
Sheriff Caleb Rutledge tries to hold the line with law and grit, but Marianna has other leaders with louder voices. Reverend Pike sells salvation by lantern light. Hollis Tarrant sells “protection” with strings attached. And the townsfolk—hungry for a story that makes them feel safe—start treating fear like a ritual.
At the center of it all is Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, a bride caught between love, gossip, and a town that keeps asking her to prove she belongs. When shame and superstition push her into the night with a lantern in hand, the crossing finally takes what it’s been waiting for…
…and earns the name that will follow it into legend.
The Ghost of Chipola: Debt Crossing is a Southern gothic horror novel of curses, crowds, and the terrible truth that the dead don’t always need to touch you to kill you—sometimes they only need to make you take one wrong step.
Some bridges don’t just connect two shores. They collect.
Welcome
R.E. Smith is a former Georgia law enforcement officer, former firefighter, former construction worker, and now a disabled author who writes with the kind of voice that comes from real life, hard work, and a long memory.
Born and raised in Rhode Island and now living in North Florida’s Big Bend, R.E. Smith writes from experience, love of family, history, life behind the badge, and the back roads where ordinary people carry stories worth telling.
R.E. Smith has written across several genres, including horror, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, romance, and nonfiction. His books include The Woods, Hodge, and The Sink, along with several multi-volume series such as Crown of Cinders, Crowns of Blood, Wolves of Tiber, and The Vault of Ki, with many more stories still growing in the dark corners of his imagination.
His stories often center on ordinary people facing extraordinary things. Some are haunted by the past. Some are tested by evil. Some are caught in history, war, love, loss, faith, fear, or the strange things that wait where the road gets narrow and the woods get quiet.
R.E. Smith writes because stories matter. They
carry pieces of where we come from. They give
voice to people who might otherwise be forgotten.
And sometimes, they let us step into the dark just
long enough to remember why we keep walking
toward the light.
For readers who enjoy stories with heart, grit,
mystery, history, horror, and a little dirt under the
fingernails, the books of R.E. Smith offer a place
to settle in and stay awhile.
Contact
For media requests, collaborations, or general questions, please reach me out at remithauthor@gmail.com
I strive to respond personally to every message, though it may take a little time as I'm often lost in a new story!