The House Without a Summer
Description
In 1816, summer vanished?and something else took its place.
Northamptonshire, 1816. The sun is veiled in a spiderwebbed red haze. Frost settles where wheat should ripen. Famine creeps through manor and village alike. And beneath it all?something stranger still: a red fungus that seals windows, invades cellars, and feeds on silence.
Marcus, the second son of the Earl of Penderbrook, returns from the Napoleonic front expecting a hero's welcome or at least a stiff drink. Instead, he finds his brother missing, his ancestral home overtaken by decay, and his father unraveling into something brutal.
Marcus is no one's idea of a savior. He'd rather gamble away his title and chase other men's wives than shoulder any legacy. But Penderbrook isn't letting him go. Not yet.
As disappearances mount and the estate reveals grotesque secrets?cellars that whisper, a folly that shifts in the corner of your eye, and something pale that watches from the pond?Marcus uncovers a truth soaked in blood, spores, and betrayal.
Whatever is happening at Penderbrook didn't begin with him. But it might end with him.
And if the corruption is in the land...
...it may already be in his blood.
For fans of Frankenstein, crumbling empires, and stories that don't flinch from the monstrous within the civilized.
More details
Person
Every summer as kids, we would host one group of cousins or another and jump off hay bales, create mazes by crawling the patterns through the tall grass, and steal green apples out of the garden. We also branded calves, killed chickens, and stole steak knives to threaten skunks with. But that's growing up on a farm for you.
Now I write fantasy, science fiction, and horror--and most of it comes from the worlds that I created as a farm kid, one way or another.
My first novel, Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse, was published by Doom Press in 2010 and can be purchased through Meta Geek.
"This is how I like my zombies: fast and funny. Choose this book, and you won't be choosing your doom. You'll be choosing hours of gooey, gory hilarity."
- Steve Hockensmith, New York Times best-selling author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls
My short story, "The End of the World," about fairies on the Great Plains, received an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 3.
I also write murder-mystery party games for Freeform Games in the UK.
See my website and blog at deannaknippling.com.
