It gets under your skin. It stays there.
A small town built on secrets. A drought that reveals what should have stayed buried. And a hunger that has waited a very, very long time.
Read the first chapterShe inherited the house from an aunt she'd never met. The paperwork said vacant. The sounds she heard at 3 a.m. disagreed.
Order nowThe town survived the first summer. But the thing in the deep didn't stop. It learned. And this time, it chose someone who knew the truth.
Pre-orderBlackwood writes the kind of horror that doesn't scare you with what it shows — it scares you with what it won't.
— Kirkus Reviews, starred review
V.R. Blackwood grew up in a house where all the clocks stopped at the same time every January, and nobody talked about it. That detail has never made it into a book. Some things stay where they belong.
She writes fiction that lives at the edge of the explicable — the kind of story where the horror isn't what comes through the door, but what's already been in the house for years. Her work has been compared to Shirley Jackson and Paul Tremblay, which she considers the highest possible compliment.
When she's not writing, she teaches a graduate seminar on folklore and the uncanny at a small college in the Pacific Northwest. She has two cats, both suspicious.