Matt Query Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Matt Query
Matt Query was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, and is a litigator that focuses on legal issues related to natural resources, water rights, public lands, and fish and wildlife management.

Matt had originally written “Old Country” as a short story which gained an enormous amount of popularity online, which lead to aggressive interest from publishers and movie studios.

Initially the vast number of comments was enough to motivate Query’s casual writing hobby since he never expected for his thrillers to blow up. However after users demanded even more details about the wife and husband and speculated on the plot, he happily obliged.

All the likes his scary posts and readers flooding his inbox with questions about the story he received, made him realize that he might actually have a hit on his hands, and got his brother Harrison (a screenwriter) to help turn his tales into a screenplay and novel, then land them in the right hands.

It took him and Harrison Query about two years for it to go from idea to publication. The spirit of the story and the general conceptual conceit stayed the same, however their editors and publishers were incredibly helpful in expanding everything about this story.

Matt and Harrison were pleasantly surprised by just how much respect was offered to them in terms of maintaining their own vision for this story and the characters. They were given so many very valuable notes and suggestions, however it was always in a spirit of collaboration instead of prescriptive mandates.

Since Harrison came from the film side, they first felt as though the novel format offered up so much real estate to explore. However they soon found that it was, as always, a matter of not having nearly enough space to include everything that they wanted.

Ultimately, the hope the novel surprises them, scares them. And if they are really lucky, makes them think a little more about their close personal relationships.

“Old Country” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2022. In a horrifyingly twisted thriller novel, one young couple finds the horror being held inside of their newly bought dream house.

This is the house of their dreams. Harry (a former marine) and Sasha (his wife) have recently packed up their entire life and Dash (their golden retriever) and fled from the corporate rat race in order to live off of the land in rural Idaho. Their breathtaking new home sits on over forty acres of aspen trees, meadow, and pine forest in the Teton Valley. Even if their family and friends believe that it is an odd choice for this up-and-coming couple of urban professionals, Sasha and Harry could not be any happier about the future that they are building, all by their lonesome.

That is, up until Dan and Lucy Steiner, who are their closest neighbors, come over bearing more than just housewarming gifts. Lucy and Dan warn Sasha and Harry about a malevolent spirit which lives in the valley, one which with every season is going to haunt them in ever-more-diabolical and fresh ways. It just seems like an old wives’ tale at first. However once spring comes, so does the first evil manifestation, challenges everything that Sasha and Harry believed they knew about the world.

While each season passes, this spirit grows stronger, the land even more sinister, and every encounter gets more dangerous. Are Sasha and Harry going to learn the real meaning of a forever home before time runs out? Bone-chilling and haunting, this is a spell binding debut in the horror genre.

This is an artful chiller, and it stirs up our primal dread of a hostile wilderness, which is indifferent to man, which is reminiscent of other great works like “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood. This is an extraordinarily assured debut novel: it is real yet uncanny, both brutal and lyrical, rich with the truth about death and life. The Querys work the worldbuilding nicely into the action and once the horror hits, they hit hard.

What began as the spookiest of stories on Reddit sparks a tour-de-force of a novel which perfectly renders the tensions of living in isolation and the unforgiving passage of the seasons of the natural world. It also delivers an unyielding sense of suspense and dread. Fans of Joe Hill and Stephen King will find this to be a satisfying escape into the woods and will certainly want to check this one out.

This was a pleasant surprise that is sure to hold you captive until the very end with its interesting story premise and great visuals. Some readers even found it to be one of the scariest books that they have ever read. It draws you in right from the start. This one is scary and twisted all at the same time and stays with you even after you have finished reading it.

“Wilderness Reform” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2024. A horrifying novel about a wilderness camp for troubled kids which is plagued by some mysterious disappearances and events, taking discipline and survival to a pretty frightening extreme.

Ben (age 13) gets sent to this remote reform program for troubled teenagers by this juvenile court judge. However when Ben shows up at the camp, which is located on the edge of the vast wilderness of northwestern Montana, he instantly recognizes that there is something off about these counselors. They are much too friendly and upbeat, but Ben is still able to tell that there is an undercurrent of menace.

While getting to know the other boys in his cabin, he quickly learns that they each have much more going for them than whatever crime had landed them there. And each has got a different critical skill, one which could help them both unearth what’s really going on in this place, and how to make it out alive. They are getting closer to the truth, and the hidden evil underneath the camp’s surface is going to make itself known to deter them from doing what they have been.