Release Announcement
The Quiet House on Tern Lane, 28 June
The Quiet House on Tern Lane comes out on 28 June. I have been sitting on it for a while and I am ready to let it go. Here is the shape of it, and no more than that. A woman named Nora Quaid takes the last ferry to Saltchurn, a fog-bound town on a speck of island off the Maine coast, after her husband drowns. Her sister has promised her that nothing bad can reach her there. Then a man starts photographing the house through the fog, and a stranger at the ferry rail says a childhood nickname she is certain she never told a living soul. Everyone has a gentle answer for all of it. Grief. Exhaustion. Take your pills, Nora. You are safe. That is as far as I will go, because the book is built to be read once without help and a second time with the lights on. It is fair-play in the strict sense: every clue is on the page, doing ordinary work, and the ending can be checked against the beginning. If you finish it and want to argue with me, go back and look. It was there. Forty-two chapters. Short ones. I am sorry in advance about your night.