Appetite of the Walls
An architect renovating her husband's family house in Guanajuato finds the interior measurements growing inward and begins eating the mineral deposits that bloom on the walls, unable to locate the moment the house stopped being a project and became a hunger.
Cameras Down
Camera malfunctions on one corridor, each documented and signed off. Work orders, shift logs, and a correctional officer's private entries record everything except what matters. The building teaches its keeper what not to see.
Inventory of the Vautrin Cellar
A wine merchant inherits a Languedoc estate and must inventory the cellar for insurance. The inventory begins as clinical notation and degrades into something between confession and concealment as he nears a walled-off section.
Bad Ground
A Ghanaian-British soil scientist studying a Caribbean sugar plantation turned boutique hotel finds anomalous bone mineral in the deep soil. Her data confirms what the locals have always known and agreed not to say — the ground is still working.
Salt and Mortar
A woman writes to her sister from an isolated house on the Essex estuary, describing her husband's salt-glaze kiln, his sealed terrariums, his kind eyes. Every word is true. The shape of the telling is the lie.
Ruling and Cause
A county coroner writes his confession: thirty years of medically defensible death rulings, each one supportable, whose accumulated pattern tells a story no individual certificate does.
Peat and Provenance
A naturalist is sent to investigate reports of a figure on the Yorkshire moors. What he finds is not a ghost but a body — a woman made of peat and heather and thirty years of unsaid words, pressing her hand against a farmhouse window.
Comfort Metrics
A content moderator moves into a smart home subsidized by her employer. The house learns her fears, her nightmares, her search history. The adjustments grow too intimate, too anticipatory, and she cannot tell whether the system is malfunctioning or performing exactly as designed.
Arsenical Soap
In a remote moorland taxidermy workshop, two women raised as sisters navigate the tyranny of a craftsman uncle who preserves everything but understanding, until a storm and a fire force an ending the house cannot pose.
Injuries Consistent With
A Black county coroner in rural Alabama begins hearing a sound beneath the evidence room floor after ruling a death accidental. Letters arrive quoting his own clinical language as accusation. The smell of a ravine he fell into thirty years ago won't leave his office.
Oversaturated
A literature professor takes a visiting post at a Tuscan villa-academy. The director's courtship is faultless, his private study locked. When she finds it open, what waits inside is worse than violence -- it is recognition.
Licit and Bound
A literature professor accepts a visiting position at a remote Italian villa-academy, where the director's courtship is generous and his private library is locked. When she finally enters the forbidden room, what she finds subverts every gothic convention she has spent her career studying.
Gnawed Clean
Under a Birmingham overpass, a former line cook gnaws a scavenged rib bone with professional contempt while a recently evicted grandmother arrives with a rolling suitcase and the conviction that her son will collect her tomorrow.
Hickory, Not Oak
Under a Memphis overpass, a former restaurant cook gnaws a rib bone with professional contempt while a recently evicted grandmother arrives with a suitcase and the absolute conviction that her daughter-in-law will come for her tomorrow.
Harlowe and Its Keeper
A governess arrives at Harlowe Hall to care for a strange child, suspecting the master hides a mad wife. What she uncovers is worse: she was never the rescuer. She was the replacement.
Gallery and Shoe
A companion hired to restore a gentlewoman to reason discovers the country house reshapes itself around what its inhabitants hide, and that a locked gallery holds a portrait the household refuses to discuss.
The Catalogue of Burned Things
A young archivist at the National Library of Buenos Aires discovers her dead grandmother's diary among an uncatalogued donation — and finds that its pages reference books that don't exist, names that recur across decades, and a house that burned down during the dictatorship.
Kin to What Burns
A white grandmother drags her reluctant family to visit the site of a former plantation she insists holds a family treasure, ignoring the warnings of the Black caretaker whose ancestors were enslaved there — and whose memory of the place runs far deeper than any deed of ownership.
Keeping House
On a remote stretch of the Cape Cod coast, Elodie Parrish tends her garden, cooks for two, and cares for a husband resting upstairs. Her days are ordered and content. The meals come back untouched. The laundry requires bleach.