The Fall of the House of Usher meets Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory crossed with The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois as adapted by Stephen King in this provocative supernatural horror fever dream from Pulitzer Prize–winner Leonard Pitts, Jr., as a sentient and vengeful house awakens to unleash its seething fury.
Keep your head down. Ignore the ghosts. Drown out the talking walls…even if they’re screaming murder.
**DELUXE EDITION HARDCOVER featuring stenciled edges.**
Hello, old house. What’s your story?
In the northwest corner of Tennessee, what was once a sprawling plantation has just been renovated into a destination hotel. But no matter how many Jacuzzis and flat-screen TVs are installed in the old slave cabins, one of those 200-year-old landmarks still remembers every unspeakable brutality it witnessed. Stare into it and you see the past. Except for one man, no one knows that this angry house is staring back.
Albert Lee is the black groundskeeper touched with a gift of visions across time. He has been hired for the opening of the luxury bed and breakfast where antebellum cosplay will draw throngs of the white and wealthy to a stretch of land soaked with the blood of the enslaved, a place stained by one act in particular—so profane that it still rattles the house’s rickety beams with rage. And it has warned Albert of deadly things to come.
When his otherworldly abilities are discovered, Albert is forced into an uneasy and unlikely partnership with a skeptical white cop as they race against time to stop the house from unleashing its righteous fury. But they had better work fast, because the one-percenters are gathering soon to the new tourist destination for a fundraiser on behalf of a controversial governor who wants to win the White House. Instead, the would-be president just may find himself presiding over a bloodbath. Will the groundskeeper and the cop find a way to stop the angry house from bringing carnage to the party?
They’re not sure they can. Albert is not even sure they should.
