“Let me know if you need anything,” she’d said when they walked in.

The woman behind the counter was unpacking a box of paperbacks. Nothing as dramatic as this, sheets of water falling so thickly from the sky that Jane couldn’t see a foot outside the window. If it rained at all, it was a delicate sprinkle that lasted ten or fifteen minutes and ended with a rainbow. She wasn’t used to driving in the rain-neither of them was. “I don’t want to go any farther until this lets up a little.” They’d made it to Maine about thirty minutes ago but the rain had driven them off the highway and into this town with the strange name-Kennebunkport-and Ruth had pulled over and idled on the side of the road until Jane searched bookstore on her phone and found this one. Outside, the rain pelted down angrily, it sounded like muffled gunshots on the roof of the bookstore, but inside, inside, surrounded by books, surrounded by the smell of them, she felt calm and tranquil, momentarily at ease, like the past five weeks had never happened. Had the smell of books calmed her down then, as it did now? She must have been a baby, a toddler, ripping pages out of a picture book about a talking stuffed animal. What it had tasted like, how it had felt-the scratch of it as it slid down her throat. She couldn’t remember the first book she had eaten. Is it grief? Mental illness? Or something more. Then Jane discovers that the “storage room” her mom has kept locked isn’t for storage at all-it’s a little girl’s bedroom, left untouched for years and not quite as empty of inhabitants as it appears. Jane’s mom also seems to be spiraling with the return of her childhood home, but she won’t reveal why. She steadily begins making new friends, but also faces bullying from the resident “bad seed,” struggling to tamp down her own worst nature in response.

and more tormented.Īs the cold New England autumn arrives, and Jane settles in to her new home, she finds solace in old books and memories of her dad. All they want is a fresh start, but behind North Manor’s doors lurks a history that leaves them feeling more alone.

From the author of You Must Not Miss comes a haunting contemporary horror novel that explores themes of mental illness, rage, and grief, twisted with spine-chilling elements of Stephen King and Agatha Christie.Following her father’s death, Jane North-Robinson and her mom move from sunny California to the dreary, dilapidated old house in Maine where her mother grew up.

Horrid katrina leno