Coming soon from St. Martin’s Press!
Novel — Pitch Wars alum
In 1998, desperate loneliness pushes twelve-year-old Amber to ignore her family’s misgivings when she meets the troubled new kid in their neighborhood. Their turbulent friendship is brief but holds lasting consequences.
Twenty-two years later, he resurfaces to kill Amber’s parents, and is in turn betrayed by his accomplice and killed in the house.
In 2020, after the murder of her parents, Amber returns to her childhood home. All she wants is to move on from her strained past and enjoy life with her husband and kids. But the familiar walls are haunted by more than bitter memories, lockdown stress, and suburban superficiality. She loses track of her thoughts and moves in and out of dreamlike trances, her reflection won’t blink, a hateful voice whispers from nowhere, and shadows gather with a will of their own. Maybe the stress is crumbling her sanity. Or maybe a spectral presence threatens her family.
Transitioning between the two timelines, this story juxtaposes the mundane evils hiding in even the most ordinary suburbs with chilling forces that move beyond our understanding.
If you love The Girls of Brackenhill by Kate Moretti and The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager (but maybe wish they had more ghosts), if you love horror movies or shows that play with the viewer’s perceptions of reality (like 2013’s film Oculus or Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House), if you love Stephen King’s approach to childhood experiences and human flaws, then you will love THESE FAMILIAR WALLS