First published 2026
Renata Scarborough returns home on a blistering summer day to discover her estranged mother Corinne's belongings dumped on her doorstep. Her relatives assume Corinne is dead, but Renata refuses to accept this conclusion. She digs through her mother's journals and discovers Corinne's work at the McNairy Observatory, along with her fixation on an early 1900s surveyor who encountered something unexplained in the same area. Driven by questions she cannot ignore, Renata travels to the abandoned observatory in Nevada's desert. The locals in McNairy won't discuss why the facility closed, and their hostility only deepens her suspicions about what really happened to Corinne. As Renata climbs the mountain above the town, she experiences disturbing events that defy explanation. A growing fear takes hold that whatever awaits her at the peak may not be her mother. Nicholas Russell's debut explores the terror that emerges when the natural world reveals something alien watching from the void.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, horror, paranormal-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, eerie, suspenseful, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: cosmic-horror, mystery-box, obsessive-investigation, unreliable-reality
Setting: McNairy Observatory, Nevada, McNairy
Period: early 1900s, summer
336 pages · Hardcover · Ecco
Content warnings: death