{ "item_title" : "Keep Breath Small", "item_author" : [" Philip Stengel "], "item_description" : "Blackwater got a Community Safety Program. Free kits. Simple rules. A copper coin to hold under your tongue and stay calm. Nobody asked what the kits were for. Then the humming started. The rules were easy. Keep your voice down. Keep your breath small. Do not panic, do not argue, do not scream. The people who broke the rules did not just lose control. They changed. Mouths split at the corners. Bone pushed forward through the gums. Horns grew out of the sound itself, curved and white and wet, as if the body were being punished for the noise it made. And fear turned out to be the loudest sound of all. Fear spread from house to house. Fear fed the pale things that waited in the fog. Riley March works deaths for the county, and the bodies in Blackwater do not bleed. They seal shut. She is the one who has to stand over each of them, learn the pattern, and carry it home to a daughter who can still hear what people mean beneath what they say. June holds the only thing that slows the spiral, an old mission bell rung in a soft, steady count. But every ring is a gamble. The bell can interrupt the change. It can also pull the choir closer. Because someone is teaching the town how to use this. The helpers arrive smiling, with more kits and better rules and a gentle voice that promises safety to anyone who does as they are told. They seal the frightened ones open-mouthed and stand them along the roadside like signposts, holding out laminated cards the way a preacher holds scripture. Follow the program. Speak small. Give up. The deeper Riley digs, the clearer it becomes that the real horror is not in the bodies at all. It is a system. It spreads through comfort and rules and the promise of quiet. It does not need to kill everyone in town. It only needs everyone to obey. It started at Seraph Springs, a wellness basin that sold the town peace and taught it to perform calm for a camera. The program was meant to help. The coins were meant to keep everyone steady. An old caretaker remembers when the same bell was rung to lead the pale things away, because Blackwater has done this before and chose to forget. By the time anyone understood what the rules were really training them to do, the fog had already reached the county line. Riley and a small band of survivors learn the only way through is discipline. Breathe small. Speak less. Never answer the wrong voice. But discipline starts to look a great deal like the obedience the helpers are selling, and the line between staying alive and giving in wears thinner with every mile of road. They do not need to win. They only need to stay human long enough to get out. Some crack. Some begin to believe the helpers were right. Keep Breath Small is survival horror and body horror built on a rule you can feel in your own jaw, a story about fear as a contagion, comfort as a trap, and the price of keeping your mouth shut to stay alive. For readers who like their horror slow, their small towns haunted, and their monsters made from everyday habits, this is a long, patient descent. Inside you will find: A town turned into a trap made of fear, where panic is a death sentence and screaming is worse.Body horror with a simple, brutal logic: make the wrong sound and the sound grows back through your face.A mother and her daughter holding the line with a copper coin and a single bell.Smiling helpers who hand out safety kits and teach obedience while the change spreads from house to house.A choir of the sealed that grows louder every time the bell rings.Slow, patient dread that gets into the throat and stays.A wellness empire that sold a whole town its own silence and called it safety.An ending that refuses to lie to you.Keep your voice down. Keep your breath small. And whatever you do, do not answer the wrong voice.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/824/424/9798244240207_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "19.99", "online_price" : "19.99", "our_price" : "19.99", "club_price" : "19.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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