Prey - Graham Mulvein

The heat doesn't kill you.
The silence does.

When a British family moves to a remote village in southern Spain, they are chasing a slower, safer life - long evenings, open land, a future that feels manageable again. But the landscape they've chosen has been waiting.

The drought has hollowed it.

Reservoirs have receded.
The olive groves stand brittle and still.
The ground has forgotten how to drink.

When their teenage daughter Amy vanishes into the groves with friends, what begins as a local search quickly becomes something far more unsettling.

Because the night does not behave the way it should.

Sound carries - then disappears.
Light reveals - then misleads.
Distance stretches - then folds back on itself.

Search teams move through the trees. Dogs follow scent that won't hold. Voices travel in the wrong direction. And as pressure builds - in the air, in the land, in the people searching - something begins to respond.

Not with intent.
With inevitability.

As a storm finally breaks over the mountains, the terrain itself starts to shift. Water forces its way through ground weakened by months of heat. Old paths vanish. New ones open. The search begins to fracture.

And in the middle of it all, the realisation takes hold:

This is no longer about finding the missing.

It's about understanding what is moving through the grove - and why it never needed to chase.

Because in this place, you are not followed.

You are registered.
Measured.
Positioned.

And when the balance tips...

you are taken.

PREY is a deeply unsettling novel of survival, landscape, and pressure - where the true horror is not something that hunts, but something that waits for the world to change around you.