Crafting for Sinners, page 1
PRAISE FOR CRAFTING FOR SINNERS
“Crafting for Sinners is a relentless, grueling survival story, one that displays the horrors that too many of our hateful and ignorant neighbors are capable of perpetrating. You will compulsively turn these pages well into the dead of night.”—PAUL TREMBLAY, New York Times best-selling author of Horror Movie and The Cabin at the End of the World
“Crafting for Sinners is like a deranged, hellish variant of Die Hard except instead it’s a gay woman trapped inside a craft store run by an evangelical nightmare cult. It’s surreal, terrifying, and thrilling and looks right down the barrel at the cultural horrors at the center of our current era. I loved this. You will love this. This is excellent stuff from Jenny Kiefer.”—CHUCK WENDIG, New York Times best-selling author of The Book of Accidents and The Staircase in the Woods
“Crafting for Sinners is a crafty yarn crocheted from the same skein as Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör and Rachel Harrison’s Cackle. Jenny Kiefer sure has spun herself a gloriously gory, bisexual MacGyver of the Damned and it absolutely fits this particular sinner like the comfiest blood-soaked sweater.”—CLAY McLEOD CHAPMAN, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“Devilishly clever. Every page of Crafting for Sinners is packed with scathing satire, unique horrors, and stunning honesty. With surprising twists and turns from beginning to end, Kiefer has crafted a delight of a novel.”—ERIN E. ADAMS, author of Jackal and One of You
“A crafty cat-and-mouse thriller.”—JOHNNY COMPTON, author of Devils Kills Devils and The Spite House
“Suspenseful, of the moment, and bloodthirsty as all hell, Jenny Kiefer’s Crafting for Sinners is the kind of book we need these days.”—NICK CUTTER, author of The Troop and The Deep
PRAISE FOR THIS WRETCHED VALLEY
A January 2024 Indie Next List Pick
One of Esquire’s Best Horror Books of 2024 (So Far)
A Library Journal Best Horror Book of 2024
“A hallucinatory nightmare of a novel that blends adventure, horror, and historical fiction and isn’t shy about violence or strangeness.”—New York Times
“Kiefer’s debut heralds the arrival of a major new horror talent. Through vivid descriptions of the creepy setting and thoughtful character portraits, Kiefer maintains a feeling of unease and nail-biting tension throughout. Devotees of daylight horror will be entranced.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A terrifying debut, rendered with the intensity and skill of Scott Smith’s cult favorite The Ruins and touches of The Hunger by Alma Katsu and Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. The novel announces Kiefer’s intentions to boldly begin her climb to the top of the genre.”—Library Journal, starred review
“Kiefer’s gory and intense debut centers on a doomed rock-climbing expedition beset by horrors both human and supernatural. Kiefer, a climber herself, utilizes her knowledge of the sport to deliver an evocative and pulse-pounding survival horror novel inspired by the Dyatlov Pass incident. This disturbing outing marks her as a writer to watch and will appeal to fans of Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) and the Showtime series Yellowjackets.”—Booklist
“A master class in both suspense and gore, This Wretched Valley is a treat for climbers and horror lovers alike.”—Laura Hubbard, BookPage
“Despite being the author’s debut novel, This Wretched Valley is a glittering contender for Best Horror of 2024 … this book is unshakeable.”—Cemetery Dance
This is a work of fiction. All names, places, and characters are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2025 by Jenny Kiefer
All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kiefer, Jenny, author.
Title: Crafting for sinners / Jenny Kiefer.
Description: Philadelphia : Quirk Books, 2025. | Summary: “When Ruth is caught shoplifting from the megachurch-owned craft store in her small hometown, she is locked in and attacked by employees who seem to have a secret and sinister plan for her”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025008583 (print) | LCCN 2025008584 (ebook) | ISBN 9781683694700 (paperback) | ISBN 9781683694717 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Horror fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3611.I396 C73 2025 (print) | LCC PS3611.I396 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20250311
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025008583
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025008584
ISBN 9781683694700
Ebook ISBN 9781683694700
Book design by Jenny Kiefer, adapted for ebook
Cover crochet art by Nicole Nikolich
Quirk Books
215 Church Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
quirkbooks.com
Quirk Books’ authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Easy Access System Europe, Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, gpsr.requests@easproject.com.
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Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Quirk Books
For my best boy
For all the empathetic fighters
COLD CASES, LOST FACES
Season 3, Episode 7
SARAH: Welcome to Cold Cases, Lost Faces, a podcast where we explore cases that went cold almost immediately. I’m Sarah and my co-host, Lindsey, is here to tell us about today’s case. And this one’s a doozy, you guys! The deeper we dove, the crazier it became. We’ll post more information and artifacts on our website, so check that out after you listen. To start, as always, we speak the victim’s name to give them power and remembrance.
LINDSEY: Today, we’re looking into the disappearance of Tom Torrence.
SARAH: This case is ice cold, y’all. We only heard about it because one of our fans’ uncle bought Tom’s house when the government finally seized it and put it up for auction—two decades after he disappeared without a trace. All of Tom’s belongings were still in the house, untouched.
LINDSEY: Bills spread out next to a checkbook, the check only half filled out.
SARAH: Dirty dishes stacked in the sink. A loaf of bread so old it had shriveled into moldy dust.
LINDSEY: The sheets askew from Tom’s last night of sleep.
SARAH: Mildew-laced laundry rotting in the washer.
LINDSEY: Our listener’s uncle inherited all of this, and more. But unfortunately for us, he gutted Tom’s house and threw out all of Tom’s belongings, and probably a lot of clues, too.
SARAH: But there’s a small bit of luck—our listener discovered an overlooked box in the basement with some of Tom’s things. Mostly photographs and some trinkets, which our listener scanned and sent to us.
LINDSEY: The photographs are so intriguing. They show Tom across his entire life span, from a little boy playing in the snow to a teenager working at an ice cream shop.
SARAH: Oh, my God, his smile is so contagious in that one!
LINDSEY: So let’s tell our listeners a little about Tom—at least what little we do know about him.
SARAH: Tom lived alone in a small town called Lovelace near Paducah, Kentucky. From the photographs and artifacts, we can tell that Tom was a sentimental person, and overall he seemed happy. He wore a broad grin in almost every photograph.
LINDSEY: We couldn’t find any official records on Tom, like a birth certificate, but based on the dates on the photos, we think he was born somewhere between 1945 and 1950 putting him in his fifties when he disappeared. We tried searching for Tom on the internet, but his name doesn’t come up with any relevant results. It was the early 2000s—not everything was as well documented as it is now.
SARAH: Again, when we say “cold case” here, it’s ice cold, y’all.
LINDSEY: And back then, nobody used their real names on the internet! Even if he was active in chatrooms or forums, he would have used a screenname. It was truly a different time.
SARAH: And when we searched for articles printed in newspapers, not much came up.
LINDSEY: There were only a few sh ort articles in the local paper about his disappearance, which was overshadowed by another news story, which we’ll get to in a second. First, we want to talk about why Tom may have gone missing.
SARAH: Since we couldn’t find any information about Tom via the usual methods, we took an unusual route. We actually looked up old phone books from the time he went missing and we cold-called some of his neighbors to see if they could tell us anything at all.
LINDSEY: This is probably the wildest thing we’ve done yet, but we owed it to Tom to try to learn more about his case.
SARAH: Honestly, it was a lot of work to try to track down current phone numbers and addresses, but luckily, a lot of his neighbors still live in the same houses. Some said they didn’t know Tom, but we were able to get some information that we don’t think anyone has uncovered yet.
LINDSEY: The neighbors who talked to us described Tom as a very nice, quiet man. They said he was a bit of a loner and rarely entertained or had visitors. He kept to himself most of the time, but was always friendly, with a pleasant hello. About a year before he went missing, a young family moved in next door to him. A couple with a baby girl—this will be important later.
SARAH: Most of the neighbors we talked to pretty much said that same thing. Tom was nice and quiet, but ultimately, they didn’t remember much about him. We thought we’d reached a dead end, until we got on the phone with a man we’ll call John—he didn’t want us to use his real name.
LINDSEY: Like we always say, names have power! So we will honor John and not use his real name.
SARAH: John was the only person we spoke to who knew Tom well. According to John, the two were more than friends. They were dating. But, sorry, guys, there’s no happy ending on this one. John and Tom did not run away together and live happily ever after. John said he wouldn’t be surprised if Tom’s disappearance had to do with his being gay. It was the early 2000s, and being gay wasn’t as accepted as it is now, especially in the small town of Lovelace, Kentucky.
LINDSEY: John said that Tom was exceptionally kind, and a great cook. When they’d have date nights, Tom would always cook and John would do the dishes. Then they’d snuggle on the couch and watch movies from Blockbuster. They didn’t tell anyone they were dating because they didn’t know what their conservative neighbors would think. They usually met up at John’s house, which was a bit more secluded than Tom’s. But a few weeks before Tom went missing, they had a date night at Tom’s house.
SARAH: John said after Tom went missing, he was pretty much the only person who was trying to look for him. The local police department didn’t seem to care, or maybe they just didn’t have the money or resources to look for a missing person. But John says he does wonder whether Tom’s disappearance was somehow tied to that one date night at Tom’s, because of something strange that happened around the same time.
LINDSEY: And here’s where the disappearance of Tom Torrence starts to get really, really weird. So we mentioned earlier that a young couple with a baby daughter had moved in next to Tom. Well, about a week after Tom went missing, the mother and daughter also went missing. Her husband said he went to work that morning and when he came back, they were gone. Her car was missing, and he thought maybe some of their valuables were gone, too, but it was hard to tell because they were in the process of moving, so everything was in boxes.
SARAH: So the question is—are the two disappearances related? Did they run away together? Or was there foul play involved?
LINDSEY: Why would Tom—a gay man—run away with a young woman who, by all accounts, he barely knew? And with her newborn?
SARAH: Unless there was something sinister in Lovelace, Kentucky, they were both running from.
LINDSEY: We’ll dive into it right after this brief break to talk about our sponsor.
Chapter 1
Stab.
Strangle.
Pull out the guts.
Ruth repeated this refrain in her head as she worked her stitches across the row. Her knuckles ached from the repetitive motion, but she had a deadline.
Her phone buzzed on the couch next to her.
“It better not be another message from Charlie,” she muttered under her breath. He’d been sending her text messages all week, saying he was sorry about how things went down, that he had a daughter now and it made him re-evaluate. That he wanted to make things right—whatever that meant.
He’d been her fiancé, and they’d broken up just a few months before their would-be vows, but that was years ago—and felt like a lifetime ago. She’d ignored every single one of the fifteen messages he’d sent so far.
Would it be possible to get the blanket tomorrow? I can pay extra.
Shit. Not Charlie—her client. Holding the stitches in place on the needles, Ruth lifted the partially finished blanket aloft. It wasn’t even at the halfway point. Not only did the commissioner want it by tomorrow, but just last week she’d asked if it would be possible to make the blanket larger. The woman had asked for a baby blanket, but then decided she wanted something the kid could grow into. Of course she’d pay extra, she’d said. Ruth had almost been finished with the thing. It took her nearly an hour to unravel the work she’d already knit, rewind the skeins, and cast on with three times the number of stitches.
She could maybe finish by tomorrow if she knitted literally every second up to the moment it would be picked up, assuming she had enough yarn. But she had to try. She really needed the money.
The “moving fund” mocked her from the mantel: an oversized ceramic jar with only a few crinkled bills and pennies in its belly. On the outside, thorny, fruit-bearing vines had been hand-painted. Inscribed on the lid were foreign characters of some unknown language. Ruth and her girlfriend Abigail had started the fund soon after Abigail’s mom passed, both hoping to move to a more progressive area, one where they didn’t have to pretend to be roommates or keep the curtains closed if they wanted to dance in the kitchen or kiss each other goodbye. Instead, they were stuck in a town of twelve thousand that boasted the largest Christian congregation in the entire state, some flashy new sect calling themselves New Creationists.
The jar became a chicken-and-egg situation. It would be easier to fill it if they could move away and get higher-paying jobs in a place with more opportunities—but they needed the jar to be full in order to move away and get those jobs. So they were stuck in Kill Devil, taking temp gigs, odd jobs, and the occasional crafting commission, the internet too slow to do anything remote. And Ruth constantly had to pull painful paper guts from the jar to pay for insulin or syringes or test strips.
“How’s the blanket coming?” Abigail asked, sitting on the couch next to Ruth.
“I’m making a dent, I guess,” Ruth replied. She leaned against Abigail, lifting her face for a kiss.
But Abigail didn’t lean back. Instead, her eyes flitted across the room, lasering in on every window. A habit she’d inherited from her mother. Ruth followed her gaze as Abigail leapt from the couch. One set of curtains was not fully closed, a sliver of midmorning light poking in, a glimpse of a single tree trunk from the untamed land that lined their yard in view. Abigail pinched them shut.
Ruth rolled her eyes. “Like mother, like daughter.”
Abigail’s mom, Judy, had always been deeply paranoid—the insane column of locks that still lined the inside of their front door was a testament to that. Now Ruth had begun to notice some similar inherited qualities in Abigail.
“One of us has to be cautious,” Abigail said. “There’s always that weird birder hanging out by the woods. What if he sees us kissing through the window? What if your old manager from New Creations finds out where you live? Didn’t they fire you over it?”
“He’s known for ages and hasn’t done anything,” Ruth said. She’d been let go nearly three years ago. “Why would they start now?”
“I don’t know, Ruth,” Abigail said, her tone like knives. “But last week that new boutique a town over was burned to the ground because they put a rainbow in the window. The largest building in a fifty-mile radius is a fucking church that preaches that being gay is a sin, and it’s very likely that whoever started the fire goes there every Sunday. Doesn’t that scare you?”
