FOUNDERS TREE CAMPAIGN
The Record Keeps Collection - Vol. 1
The Founders
Tree
Some monuments remember. This one feeds.
A horror novel. A confidential historical file. A name that has been buried for over a hundred years.
The story will carry you in. What is in the back of the book is why it matters right now.
What this is
A horror story.
A confidential file.
A format built for this moment.
The Record Keeps is a horror fiction series with a structure that has never been done. Each volume is a complete novel, and in the back, sealed behind a section called The Receipts, is the documented historical record tied to the real person at the center of the story.
Not a summary. Not a footnote. The record, with photographs, with names, with dates that do not soften what happened.
The story gets you in the room. The Receipts are why you cannot leave the same.
"The story was the door. This is the room."
The Founders Tree - The ReceiptsVolume One is called The Founders Tree. It follows a sixteen-year-old girl who wins a fellowship at a remote camp in old-growth redwood forest in Northern California and finds something ancient living at the center of it. Something that feeds on forgetting. Something that has been hiding a name for over a hundred years.
The name is in the back of the book. So is everything they did to him. So are the names of the others.
What you do with that name after you read it is up to you.
The Receipts
The file is
classified.
Access is reserved for those who pre-order.
He was a real man. He was taken from his home and brought to the United States in 1904. He was put on display at one of the largest public events in American history, in front of ████████████ people. Then he was put somewhere worse.
The man who arranged it was celebrated. Honored. Named after. His legacy has been carefully preserved. The man he put in a cage was carefully █████████.
He was not the only one. The Receipts name the others. Those whose names survived. And those who were taken without anyone thinking their names were worth writing down.
The institution responsible did not formally apologize until ████. One hundred and █████████ years later.
The author says it plainly: forgetting is real. And it does feed. Almost everything underneath the story is documented fact that you were simply never taught. Pre-order the book and the full file is yours.
Why this moment
History is being
erased in real time
Curricula are being cleared. Archives are being reclassified. The stories of Black Americans are being labeled controversial content and removed from the places where children learn who they come from. We are watching, right now, the same machinery that buried this man's name trying to bury it again.
A book is harder to erase than a curriculum. A physical record in your hands, in your home, passed to your child, is an act of resistance. This series is not a response to the moment. This series is a document of it.
The Founders Tree was written so that a name no one was supposed to know makes it out into the world. Into your hands. Into your mouth. Into your children.
"I have learned that the people most afraid of tearing down a monument are almost never the ones the monument was built on top of."
The Founders TreePre-order your copy
Your contribution
secures your copy
This is a pre-order campaign. Every contribution secures your signed copy when printing is complete. Every dollar goes directly toward ISBN registration, professional printing, and getting this book into the hands of people who need it.
Contributors of $75 and above become The Record Keeps Founders: their names printed permanently inside the book as part of the archive. Not in an acknowledgments section. Inside the record itself. This designation carries across all future volumes in the series.
The record rises
His name has been
buried long enough.
Pre-order your copy. Own a piece of the record. Say his name where they can hear it.
Pre-Order The Founders Tree