First published 2003
Vernelia Charter lives in a house where ghostly voices whisper from the walls. Her father has fallen under the spell of Reverend Elias Fitcher, a charismatic preacher who claims 1843 will be the world's final year. Fitcher runs a utopian community near Jeckyll's Glen in New York's Finger Lakes, where believers prepare for the apocalypse. When the preacher decides he wants to enter eternity as a married man, he chooses Vernelia as his bride. She moves to his estate, leaving behind her sisters Amy and Catherine. Marriage reveals Fitcher's sinister nature. Rumors suggest he has wed before, though his previous wives have vanished. The answer may lie in the locked room at the top of his house, the one place he has forbidden her to enter. All three Charter sisters will face the preacher's darkness in this retelling of the Bluebeard fairy tale, set during the religious ferment that swept through New York's Burned-Over District.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 19th-century, gothic
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, forbidden-room
Setting: Finger Lakes, Jeckyll's Glen, New York
Period: 1843
400 pages · Kindle Edition · Tor Books
Content warnings: abuse, violence