First published 2025
Annie Blunt has had a brutal year. Her husband died in an accident. One of her children's books blew up into a public scandal. So she packs up and moves with her young son Charlie to a small town in upstate New York, hoping the quiet will help them both recover. Charlie is restless and isolated until he discovers an old train set locked away in a shed on their property. He loves it immediately. Annie is glad to see him happy. Then the nights get strange. She wakes to the sound of a train running somewhere nearby, even though no active rail line exists for miles. Odd things start happening around the neighborhood. And Annie, a professional illustrator, keeps drawing the same unsettling figure over and over, a character that has no business appearing in any book she would write. She knows grief can distort a person's thinking. She has been through enough to understand that. But what is happening around her feels less like mourning and more like something she cannot yet name, and far more dangerous than anything she left behind.
Genres: fiction, horror, adult-fiction, psychological-thriller, mystery-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, emotionally-complex, haunting, suspenseful, unsettling
Tropes: grief-induced-delusion, haunted-house, unreliable-narrator
Setting: upstate New York
464 pages · Paperback · William Morrow Paperbacks
Content warnings: death