Published November 4, 2025 by Berkley
A woman must confront the evil that's been terrorizing her street since she was a child in this gripping haunted house novel from the national bestselling author of The House That Horror Built and Good Girls Don’t Die.
On an otherwise ordinary street in Chicago, there is a house. An abandoned house where, once upon a time, terrible things happened. The children who live on this block are told by their parents to stay away from that house. But of course, children don’t listen. Children think it’s fun to be scared, to dare each other to go inside.
Jessie Campanelli did what many older sisters do and dared her little brother Paul. But unlike all the other kids who went inside that abandoned house, Paul didn’t return. His two friends, Jake and Richie, said that the house ate Paul. Of course adults didn’t believe that. Adults never believe what kids say. They thought someone kidnapped Paul, or otherwise hurt him. They thought Paul had disappeared in a way that was ordinary, explainable.
The disappearance of her little brother broke Jessie’s family apart in ways that would never be repaired. Jessie grew up, had a child of her own, kept living on the same street where the house that ate her brother sat, crouched and waiting. And darkness seemed to spread out from that house, a darkness that was alive—alive and hungry.
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This is horror tucked inside a monster house, with an entire cosmos pulsing just beneath the floorboards. The house is alive in that constant, watching-you way, crowded with impossible voices and layered tragedy. Cosmic horror often feels vast and distant, but here it’s close. It presses in. It’s slow, suffocating, and painfully personal. The universe doesn’t just fail to care. It mocks.
What hit hardest was the found family at the center of it. These characters are bound together by shared damage, survival, and the kind of loyalty that forms after everyone else has already failed you. The house has taken so much from the neighborhood, and they stay behind to bear witness. To keep watch. To carry the guilt that refuses to be outrun.
Bleak, eerie, and still emotionally cutting.
