The Solitude of Ancient Things

In the dark beneath the floorboards, something ancient is waiting to be heard.

Eleanor Whitmore has spent thirty-two years living a small life-an unmarried governess in Boston, bound by duty, starved of hope. Then a letter arrives bearing a wax seal she does not recognize: a house with seven windows, one slightly ajar.

She has inherited Thornwood House from a great-aunt she never knew.

The estate is isolated, crumbling, and utterly silent. But not empty. On her first night, Eleanor hears footsteps beneath the floorboards. Whispers rise from the cellar in her mother's voice-her mother, who died at the bottom of a staircase, whispering words Eleanor never understood:

"Don't let them take you below."

She soon discovers the terrible truth. Thornwood was built upon a "thin place"-a wound in the world where an ancient, solitary consciousness presses against the veil of reality. In 1692, her ancestor Jedediah Harrow made a covenant with this entity, known only as the Tenant. In exchange for prosperity, every generation must offer a Harrow woman to descend into the darkness below. To be absorbed. To become part of the Tenant's endless, hungry solitude.

Constance Harrow, Eleanor's great-aunt, fought the covenant for sixty years. She filled journals with forbidden research, carved protective symbols into the walls, and delayed the inevitable. But in the end, the Tenant took her anyway.

Now Eleanor is the last of the Harrow line. The covenant demands its due.

But Eleanor Whitmore is not merely a Harrow woman. She is also a Whitmore-stubborn, analytical, unwilling to surrender. She will not go gently into that dark. She will not be consumed.

She will descend. She will serve. And she will renegotiate the terms.

The Solitude of Ancient Things is the second book in the Thornwood Chronicles-a gothic horror novel for readers of H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Susanna Clarke. Atmospheric, haunting, and unexpectedly hopeful, it asks a chilling question:

What does loneliness do to a being that has never known anything else?