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The Dying Grove
Paperback
Series: Fractional Fiction, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 5 2026
Pages: 118
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.28 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A graduate student arrives at a remote Pacific Northwest research station to map an ancient fungal network. What he discovers beneath the forest floor will challenge everything he believes about consciousness, memory, and what it means to persist beyond individual death.
Eli Chen has one chance left to salvage his academic career. His dissertation on fungal communication networks has been dismissed as speculative, his funding cut, his advisor skeptical. When a cryptic invitation arrives from the Cascade Research Station, he takes it, expecting nothing more than data collection in the old-growth forest.
What he finds is a dying ecosystem and the scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding it. Gabriel Morrow, the station director, is failing in ways no one will name. Margaret keeps the station running while keeping secrets of her own. Thomas Chandler studies bark beetles but watches everything. And beneath them all, connecting everything, lies a four-thousand-year-old mycorrhizal network that has been listening far longer than anyone suspected.
As Eli's instruments begin detecting patterns that defy conventional explanation, he faces a choice that will define not just his research but his existence. The network is dying. It remembers everything. And it has been waiting for someone capable of carrying what it knows into the future.
The Dying Grove is a novel about connection in an age of isolation, about the boundaries we draw between self and world, and about what might persist when individual consciousness ends. It is also a story about science, love, grief, and the courage required to become something larger than yourself.
The first book in the Fractional Fiction series, The Dying Grove combines the literary traditions of Joyce's epiphanic realism with contemporary mycorrhizal network research to explore questions that neither science nor art can answer alone.
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