Read An Excerpt From Observer By Nicholas Russell

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Observer by Nicholas Russell, a disquieting, atmospheric debut horror novel out from Ecco on September 15th.

On a scorched summer day, Renata Scarborough comes home to find the contents of her estranged mother Corinne’s life on her doorstep. Her aunt and cousin seem eager to conclude that the troublesome Corinne is dead. Renata isn’t convinced and begins poring over her mother’s journals for answers. Among descriptions of Corinne’s work at the McNairy Observatory, Renata unearths a hidden obsession with an early twentieth-century surveyor whose encounters with a mysterious entity bear a startling resemblance to her mother’s reports. Compelled beyond reason, Renata journeys to that now-abandoned outpost in the Nevada wilderness to search for the truth.

But in McNairy, a thorny, decades-long clash between science and the desert only complicates Renata’s questions. The town’s scarred and suspicious residents refuse to discuss the observatory’s closure, leaving Renata to wonder if Corinne’s version of events reflects reality. As she ascends the peak that looms over McNairy, Renata witnesses unnerving phenomena she can’t explain and feels a creeping dread that what is waiting for her isn’t her mother at all.

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The First Visitation

The following excerpt is taken from the recovered diaries of a river surveyor named Francis Brown. Brown lived and worked along the Colorado River in the early 20^th century. Tasked with measuring the depth, temperature, and composition of the river at various locations, as well as the rate of flow and water turbulence, the surveyor performed duties that have since been overtaken by digital tools. However, at the time these entries were written, such an occupation necessitated meticulous attention to detail, an extensive knowledge of geology and geography (such as was available), and a tolerance for long stretches of time spent in isolation in sparsely inhabited, or wholly deserted, areas. Twenty volumes of Brown’s diaries have been recovered to date. Little is known about his life or background apart from what has been gleaned from his writings. He was married for a short time but, not long after his disappearance, his wife remarried. It is assumed he had no children or significant family members. Of interest to the preservationist, Brown’s name has been linked to a series of incidents spanning over a century, in both the state of Nevada and Colorado. A portion of these diaries were discovered in an antique shop in Death Valley by Terrence Crouch, an astrophysicist at the McNairy Observatory in Nye County, Nevada, in 1995. Crouch’s whereabouts, like the remains of Brown, are unknown.

August 5, 1905

A broken arm today, thankfully not my writing arm, though I do fancy myself capable of passing ambidexterity. In truth, this is one of several little disasters that have conspired against me over a course of months. Indeed, though the events that led to my injury were entirely accidental, they do not feel incidental. They fall together like the key to a cipher.

It began with a discovery, the record of which I had made note on unbound pages and had failed to copy in this diary. Reading these entries back now—I could not continue my usual recordings in this volume for some months last year when I was forced by the company to temporarily relocate my base of operations upriver, the resulting disruption depriving me of my original effects, which were stowed safely at measuring station GR-5—I do not recognize the man who wrote them. One feature stands out: the clipped nature of my sentences, so terse, rushed, as I was then, working alongside a colleague named Wilshire who seemed, in a word, touched.

To say nothing of the inconsistency with which I wrote. I have never allowed whatever day’s trials to interrupt the fullness of these entries. If I find myself weary, unfocused, or otherwise spiritually despondent, I reserve my recollection for the following morning when I am restored. There were indeed unspeakable nightmares on many occasions during those spring and summer months. I cannot account for them nor the stalking, depressing gloom I felt so acutely then. More troublingly, I cannot account for the return of those same feelings this very week, which possess the quality of a premonition.

I made note of the tree in the tunnel, a novelty that would have otherwise been omitted for the fact that I would not have known it existed without such abrupt change in scenery. Wilshire had been the first to alert me to its presence. I seem to refrain from writing, in the previous entries, that the passage leading from the Grand River to the tree lies directly beneath the living quarters Wilshire and I shared. I believe I made some note of this to Lenny in one of my letters—of Wilshire’s energy, inoffensive but highly changeable, sometimes rising and falling in direct proportion to his obsession with this tree.

Indeed, I confess here, months later, that I did not share with Lenny my suspicions that the fellow likely seemed a half-breed afflicted with the mental instability of the conjoined races. I harbor no prejudice against Wilshire if that is indeed his heritage nor against any others of his kind. There is every indication that my own father, proud and stout as he is, might have something tainted in his blood, some quality to the fullness of his lips, the shelflike jutting of his brow that has always struck me as obviously negroid. I did not mention any of this to Lenny who, for all I know, may one day read these diaries and if so, must forgive my impertinent suppositions. I only know that she once loved a mongrel man, that she wished to bear him children, that their union was forbidden by her family, that, to this day, I remain unconvinced that she did not indeed give birth to this man’s child. I have never met him nor glimpsed his likeness, but his existence haunts me. In those courting months, it took all my persuasive powers, of which there are few, to convince Lenny to confess to me the truth of this relationship before we wed. I have never held it against her. Who can hold love, even misguided, aberrant love, against any heart?

Besides, it was her refusal to give in to shame that told me all I need know and allowed me to trust in her as she trusted in me. She did not hide this man or their time together from me out of malice or embarrassment, but out of common decency and propriety. To her, there remains nothing to be ashamed of, a stance she clarified as it applied to him and to me. I cannot say that I have known any woman so forthright or so withering in her lack of fear or politeness. Of course, I would have granted her anything, out of love and out of guilt, for there are lovers in my past that Lenny has never known about. And yet, when I first met Wilshire, I thought immediately of my wife’s first love and a pang of jealousy stung my heart. That irrationality clings to me even now.

The first time we ventured out together with the intention of visiting this curious secret of nature, Wilshire led with his wan, genial manner. I followed with no small measure of confusion and impatience. The man had not stopped talking about the tree during those first weeks. As we waded into the river and passed into the tunnel, which appeared to have been scratched rather than dug, I had been too foolish to notice that the shafts of light burning from above were the very holes that dotted the anterior space near our station, apertures I had taken for mole diggings or the dens of those overlarge spiders I have had no choice but to grow accustomed to here.

I regarded the tree’s existence as unremarkable, though I did not make note of this. I had ceased my diary entries for several months following my relocation, frustrated by a lack of materials. The retrieval of this current diary was impossible. At the time, I had been delivered some twenty miles by wagon to a comparatively bustling watering hole by the river. This nascent village was in the throes of development. Wooden buildings that would later house a saloon, a grocer, a hotel were being crafted as I disembarked. I remember a wave of unbecoming aversion at the sight of so many people. After the tranquility and seclusion of my work in previous months, society seemed crude. And yet, no paper, no ink. I left a note with the grocer, who lived in a canvas tent beside his future business, that I would pay to get my hands on a handsome leather-bound journal, at least seven inches by ten inches, with no fewer than 100 unmarked pages. I believe I waited at least two months before such an item arrived. In that span, Wilshire’s discovery became my preoccupation.

I cannot shake the sensation of being watched as I write through this diary.

I do not actively believe myself to be writing in any way for posterity—I simply hope to know my own mind, I tell myself this as if it is not self-evident, as if I am defending against an assailant who doubts my character, and in even elucidating that thought, the noble pursuit of recording some facet of being for later study, I seem all the more uncertain as to whether this pursuit of self-knowledge is true. I cannot shed this impulse to clarify all that might be misconstrued and in doing so, new revelations peek out from behind the thistle and chaff of my thoughts. I also sense that, barring the normal erasures and losses that accompany most any life, I must be as clear as possible. I must be thorough.

It is no detour to stake this reality as aberrant, for it began on that very day with Wilshire. He showed me his little hidden passage by the river, and while I was unimpressed then, a creeping feeling, quite unexpected but present as any natural force, seemed to have attached itself to me. It has followed me wherever I go. I know now it is because the tree is not of this world. It cannot, in light of recent developments, be reasonably called a tree though its outer presentation would suggest otherwise. It is the vehement oddity of what Wilshire has happened upon that frames this entire affair in an even more bewildering light. Wilshire claimed to have known of this specimen long before he was stationed at GR-11.

Wilshire hailed from Arizona, from another portion of the river that flows along its southwestern borders, and so shared his familiarity of the Grand’s pathways with me as a point of professional concern born from a singularly personal passion. He had been destined to make his living along the river’s flows, he told me. No other profession had ever occurred to him. And what better occupation than to live beside the current, take its measure, report on its fluctuations in water level, temperature, composition, rate of flow? In short, what other line of work not only permitted but required an intimate relation to its foundational area of study? Wilshire was besotted.

I could share in some of his enthusiasm for the work, but I am no naturalist. I do not regard these charred and verdant landscapes with superstition or the condescending exoticism credited to the Indian. It is one of the privileges of this lonely occupation that I have encountered the Indian, broken bread with him, and come to understand that his ways are no better or worse than our own. He has been afforded what the imperial nation of America can never manufacture—time—and with that comes knowledge, hard won but sensible enough. He may believe in gods I do not see and he may keep them. But it is clear that those like Wilshire, who fancy themselves Indians in white dress-up, harbor a delusional aspect that is dangerous. Still, I cannot wholly deny Wilshire’s skill, his ability to divine changes in weather long before they developed, his aptitude for direction. There were many times, on various excursions out into the wilderness in search of natural springs or groundwater wells, when we became lost only because of my ineptitude and were saved because of Wilshire’s superior attunement to the desert.

I do believe now that I was being tested in those first months. Wilshire was taking my measure and I, having unwittingly passed some invisible-to-me examination administered by him, was allowed into some psychic inner sanctum. He took it upon himself to show me the specimen as a matter of urgency, quite literally pulling me by the arm out of the station and marching us to the river’s edge. After some splashing about, more the result of my sour and reluctant conduct, which saw me wrestling with Wilshire like a child, Wilshire seemed to decide it was better to simply continue down into the tunnel without dragging me and I would either follow him or return to the station.

Needless to say, I followed.

We gazed at the specimen for at least an hour that first day, and I confess I could not have been less amused. Wet, perplexed, exhausted with my partner’s disorienting behavior, all I could think was how unfortunate it was to allow such good quality trousers as the ones I wore to soak in muddied waters for so prolonged a time. But, just before we departed, as if those final moments were indeed what we had been made to wait for, the tree-like specimen moved.

Distinctly, its branches twitched, not the twitch of wind passing through the tunnel or the thrash of some small dace swimming out from beneath its roots, but a deliberate, animal spasm, as if muscles had been fired by nerves. The grayish, veined bark running in vertical lines along its main trunk stretched ever so slightly, as if the thing breathed, though there was no attendant sound of an exhale nor the return of the body to an equilibrium state, as when a man breathes in, seems to enlarge himself ever so slightly with that breath, then breathes out again, shrinking back down to his natural form. It was more like the tree was rearranging something within itself, as if it were making room for an object or shifting that object about inside it, as if there were a fetus buried somewhere unseen.

In the depths of the tunnel, against the wall where the tree had rooted itself, a pocket of shadow hid any further scrutiny of its form. I looked over to Wilshire, standing there, one hand braced on the ceiling, his body swaying with the trapped current of the passage, and deemed his toothless smile an omen.

A few days following Wilshire’s revelation, he was removed from his post at GR-11 and I was left alone in that strange place. He informed me of his reassignment further down river as a matter of no great concern. Poised at the station’s entrance, hat in hand, Wilshire’s parting words were, “Not too close, not too far.” I have not seen him since, but in his absence, my focus lay solely with the tree. Many afternoons I spent in thrall to the possibility that the specimen might move again, but such hopes proved to be in vain. I was to spend another four months at GR-11, with a total of 54 visitations that I noted, all at least one hour in duration, and not once did the tree move in a way I could perceive, not like it did that first day. By early fall, I was allowed to return to my former posting at GR-5 and decided this brief obsession was best left alone.

It was only a matter of weeks after returning that I found a corpse. There is no other way to describe it.

Excerpted from Observer, copyright © 2026 by Nicholas Russell.

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