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The trailer for Dust and Mercy is here — a modern Good Samaritan story set in 1959 Appalachia.

A coal company comes for Hollow Ridge one family at a time, and Eli McKinnon has to decide what he owes the people beside him when standing his ground means standing alone.

What would it cost you to stop for your neighbor?

Preorder: https://rmkiser.com/books/dust-and-mercy

The trailer for Dust and Mercy is here — a modern Good Samaritan story set in 1959 Appalachia.

A coal company comes for Hollow Ridge one family at a time, and Eli McKinnon has to decide what he owes the people beside him when standing his ground means standing alone.

What would it cost you to stop for your neighbor?

Here's what actually goes into a book cover before anyone's read a single page.

For The Echo Rewritten, I wanted something that felt like memory itself — gold and amber tones, like light caught in glass, almost like time trapped inside it. Weeks of typography tests before I found something that felt right.

A cover has to signal tone and genre instantly, and carry a feeling about what's inside — all without saying anything directly. It's the first conversation the book ever has with a reader.

Has a cover ever made you pick up a book you knew nothing about?

23 days before launch — this is the first time I'm holding Dust and Mercy as an actual book.

The proof copy showed up today, and I filmed the second I opened it. Up until now, this book only existed as a file on a screen. Holding it as something real changes how it feels — less like a project, more like it's actually about to exist in the world.

What's it like seeing something you made become real for the first time?

What most people don't realize about Appalachian land boundaries: it was never paperwork. It was a handshake.

While writing Dust and Mercy, I researched how these boundaries used to get settled — just somebody's word about where a fence used to sit, trusted for generations.

That system worked only as long as everyone agreed to honor it. The moment someone wants something enforceable instead of trusted, it falls apart — not because anyone broke the law, but because trust stopped being enough. That's the real spine of Eli's boundary dispute in the book.