The House Beneath the Tide

When disgraced grief counselor Mara Voss inherits Blackwater House, a decaying seaside asylum on an island erased from modern maps, she intends to sell it and disappear before the anniversary of her husband’s suicide. But the locals refuse to speak of the island, the ferry captain won’t stay after dusk, and every room in Blackwater contains evidence that Mara has been there before—even though she has no memory of it.

At night, the tide rises impossibly high and something vast breathes beneath the floorboards. Patients’ records describe the same recurring delusion: a drowned god wearing the faces of the dead. As Mara reads the asylum’s journals, her own body begins to change, her memories contradict one another, and the house reveals itself not as a prison for madness, but as a mouth.

To escape, Mara must learn what happened in Blackwater’s final winter—and why every version of the truth ends with her unlocking the cellar door.