The Thorned Mouth

The gravel announced her arrival before she could see the house. Wren Calloway has come to Hollow Creek to settle the estate of her great-aunt Maren, a woman the family never spoke of and Wren never met. But the house at the end of the birch-lined driveway is not empty. It is full of locked rooms, yellowed letters, and photographs of women who all share her jaw, her eyes, her name. As Wren begins to sort through the dead woman's possessions, the forest pressing against the windows begins to press back. A girl named Sadie appears in mirrors and doorways, warning her to leave. The local historian Eli Marsh insists the woods are hungry and have already taken three generations of Calloways. Her sister Margot, left behind in the city, grows colder with every phone call. And in a notebook hidden beneath the floorboards, Wren finds her own handwriting in ink she does not remember using. The deeper she digs into Aunt Maren's correspondence with the mysterious Thessaly Vane and the recluse Dr. Cyrus Pell, the more certain she becomes: the house is not haunted. It is bait. And something in the trees has been patient long enough. To survive, Wren must learn what her great-aunt knew, what the Forest Entity truly wants, why it wears the faces of the dead, and what bargain every Calloway woman before her made in the dark. The house wants her to stay. The forest wants her to feed it. And the only way out may be to stop running from the bloodline that brought her here.