✶ Author · Storyteller · World Builder ✶
Pen name of Angela Smith
Where the fallen angels learn what it means to finally come home,
and the women of eastern Kentucky are tougher than the mountains that made them.
The Woman Behind the Words
Angela Smith — known to readers as Kaylin Renea — is the author of the Holler & Hellfire paranormal romance series, the co-creator of the Holler & Hellfire Universe alongside her fiancé Brian Lee Webb, and the storyteller behind one of the most ambitious independent fiction projects currently in the making.
Angela is a native Missourian, born and raised in the heartland, currently living in Barry County, Missouri — near the Arkansas border, where the Ozark hills begin to soften into something quieter and older than history. That relationship with land that holds its own secrets, its own memory, and its own frequency is something she carries directly into her writing.
At 43 years old, Angela came to the Holler & Hellfire universe not as a casual visitor to a genre, but as a woman with something specific and burning to say — about faith, about women who hold things that have no name, about the divine as something ancient and democratic and deeply tied to the land beneath your feet.
Angela describes herself as an Omni believer — someone on an active, searching journey toward what she calls the real enlightenment frequency. That spiritual restlessness lives on every page of the Holler & Hellfire books: in the Thinning, in the hollow witches' practice, in the Watchers who fell because something in the mortal world spoke to something in them that the formal framework couldn't contain.
She is engaged to Brian Lee Webb, CEO of Holler & Hellfire Records and co-creator of the universe — her partner in life, in work, and in building something that neither of them could have built alone.
In Angela's Own Words
I want to be clear about something that matters deeply to me: I mean no insult to anyone by my story. I have nothing but the deepest respect for all the peoples of Appalachia — for the women, the mountains, the traditions, the language, the faith, the complicated and beautiful history of one of the oldest places in the world.
That respect — that genuine reverence — is exactly why I chose to set this story there. Because when I was looking for a place in this world that still holds something ancient and real and unbroken, where the land itself carries a frequency that most of the modern world has paved over, Appalachia kept calling to me. Pike County, Kentucky kept calling to me. The holler kept calling.
Sadly, all of my knowledge of the area — her customs, her people, her dialect, her frequency — comes from hours and hours of dedicated study. I have not yet stood on that ground. I have not yet breathed that air. But I plan to visit soon, and I plan to listen the way I always try to listen: with my whole self, with my mouth closed and my ears open.
I hope I am welcome there. I believe I will be, because I am coming in the spirit I have always tried to bring to this work: as someone who sees the women of Appalachia not as characters, but as the kind of women the whole world needs more of. Women who hold doors. Women who know the land. Women who keep what matters and let the rest go.
My hope is that my respect for them comes through in the telling. If it doesn't — if I've gotten something wrong, if a word lands wrong, if the mountain says I've missed something — please tell me. I am listening. I have always been listening.
— Angela Smith (Kaylin Renea) · hollerandhellfire@gmail.com
The Holler & Hellfire Universe
Eleven books. Three albums. One mountain. A six-book paranormal romance saga set in eastern Kentucky's Pike County — where the boundary between heaven and earth runs thin, the women of the Calhoun bloodline have held the door for seven generations, and the fallen angels of the Book of Enoch are finally being asked to come down off the mountain. Extension books continue the universe beyond the original saga.
The Souls of the Holler
Every book is a bond. An Anchor — a woman of the holler who holds the door — and a Watcher, one of the fallen Grigori from the Book of Enoch, learning what it means to finally come home. These are the souls who carry the Holler & Hellfire universe.
Raelee “Dixie” Calhoun — the holler’s own outlaw, the voice of the records, the first woman to hold the door for a fallen Watcher.
The first to fall. The one who taught humankind the forbidden arts — and the first to learn what it costs to be loved anyway.
The herbalist. Methodical, deliberate, keeper of the grandmother medicine — the one who knows that the smallest detail can save or damn a soul.
The leader of the Grigori descent. The one who organized the fall — and carries the weight of every Watcher who followed him down.
The warm room made flesh. Twenty-six years of treating everyone who walks in like they deserve to be warm. Faith that doesn’t flinch.
Lightning’s own Watcher — the teacher of astrology, the one who reads the sky and isn’t afraid of what strikes down.
The grey-area gospel. Not a villain, not a hero — something in the middle, where the real work lives. Tackett blood, Tackett spine.
The spell-breaker. The one who taught the resolving of enchantments — and must now unmake the spell laid on his own heart.
The quiet one. The letters, the seventy-year star, the cottage. The woman who wrote down the stars without knowing they were already hers.
The star-teacher. The Watcher of constellations — the one whose whole purpose was always running toward something he hadn’t met yet.
Soft name, iron spine. A Weaver of the bloodline whose story shares her name — because some women are the whole title.
The Watcher of hidden things — the teacher of the serpent’s knowledge, the one who knows what blooms in the dark.
The start of the Expansion Arc. A new generation, a new door — and all the secrets a holler keeps when it decides to keep them.
The Watcher of the deep — keeper of buried things, the one who knows that every secret has a weight and every weight has a name.
Thunder in a small frame. A woman who sees what’s coming before it arrives — and stands her ground when it does.
The Watcher of thunder and true dreams — the one who guides the visions of the night and the storms of the day.
Dark-haired, dark-eyed, gothic to the bone. The one who carries judgement without flinching — and learns what it weighs to forgive.
The Watcher of judgement — the teacher of the signs of the sun, the one who must weigh his own fall against the woman who anchors him.
Calm in the center of chaos. The cross she wears isn’t decoration — it’s the still point the whole storm turns around.
The Watcher of the clouds — the one who reads the weather of heaven and earth, and stands in the eye when all of it breaks loose.
Arms crossed, guard up, heart guarded harder. The one who knows that the first word is the hardest — and the most important.
The Watcher who taught humankind to write — the keeper of the first word, the ink, the bitter and the sweet of knowing.
Pink-haired, sharp-eyed, unafraid. The Weaver who drew the attention of Heaven’s own Enforcer — and gave him a reason to defect.
Not a Grigori. The blade Heaven sent to bring the Watchers to account — who looked at what they’d built in the holler, lowered the sword, and chose the door.
On the Setting
The Holler & Hellfire universe is set in Pike County, Kentucky — in the heart of eastern Appalachia, where the mountains are older than most of the geology books admit and the people who live among them have developed a relationship with the land that doesn't translate easily into words most of the modern world uses.
I am a Missouri woman. I did not grow up in a holler. I have not walked those ridgelines or sat beside those creeks or heard the particular way that silence settles in the mountains at dusk when the Thinning, as I call it, runs closest to the surface. Not yet. But I have spent years — quiet, careful, respectful years — listening to the people who have. Reading their words. Studying their history. Learning their traditions from the inside out, not the outside in.
When I say I respect Appalachia, I mean the whole thing: the coal seams and the strip-mining scars, the church music and the old magic that the church never fully drove out, the grandmother medicine and the front-porch theology, the warrants and the wildflowers, the dialects that are closer to Elizabethan English than anything spoken in the cities, the women who have been holding things since before anyone thought to write it down.
If you are an Appalachian reader and you find something in these pages that I have gotten wrong — please tell me. I will listen. I will correct it. And I will be grateful, because the mountain deserves better than someone who thinks they know more than they do. I don't. I'm just someone who heard the frequency from a long way off and started walking toward it.
I plan to visit Pike County soon. I plan to stand on that ground and be corrected by it. I hope the mountain is as patient with me as its people have always been. I believe it will be. I believe I am walking toward it in the right spirit, and the right spirit, in my experience, is usually enough to get you where you're going.
The Co-Creator
The Holler & Hellfire Universe was not built alone. Angela's fiancé, Brian Lee Webb — sole proprietor of Webbs Entrepreneurship and CEO of Holler & Hellfire Records — is the co-creator of the universe that these books inhabit.
Brian runs the music side of the universe: Holler & Hellfire Records, the companion album series performed by Dixie Deadshot, the production, the vision. Angela runs the words. Together they have built something that is more than a book series and more than a record label — a full creative universe with its own mythology, its own characters, its own cosmology.
They are building something they hope will change the world a little. That is not hyperbole. That is just the two of them, sitting with the work, believing in it the way you have to believe in something to make it real.
Reach Out
Angela reads every email she receives. Whether you're a reader, a fellow writer, an Appalachian person with a correction or a piece of knowledge to share, a press inquiry, or someone who just felt something in these pages and needed to say so — she wants to hear from you.
The universe is still being built. The mountain is still being listened to. If you have something to add to that conversation, the door is open.