First published 2023
A painter discovers something wrong with the portraits in her West Australian convent school. An actor dies during a performance and returns to terrorize his mother's home. At Muckross Abbey, an Irish chieftain's burial ground, a flesh eating groom's spirit stalks the living. Writers and historians encounter supernatural forces that defy explanation. Nuns face otherworldly presences in their cloistered walls. Each story pulls its characters into confrontations with ghosts that refuse to stay buried. Murray crafts ten tales that span from English moors to Cape Cod shores, where the past bleeds into the present through violent and unexpected ways. These stories explore how the dead maintain their grip on the living, transforming ordinary people into witnesses of impossible events. The collection reveals the thin boundary between our world and whatever lies beyond it.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, horror, ghost-stories
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, suspenseful
Tropes: supernatural-elements, the-dead-haunt-the-living
Setting: Australia, Cape Cod, England, Ireland, Muckross Abbey, West Australia
Period: 20th-century
256 pages · Paperback · Grove Press