The House That Molts

When disgraced sleep researcher Mara Vale accepts a winter caretaker job at Halcyon House, a shuttered sanatorium on a tidal island off the Maine coast, she tells herself isolation is the cure she deserves. Six months earlier, her experimental insomnia study ended with three patients dead and Mara unable to remember the final night. Halcyon offers quiet, money, and a locked archive rumored to contain the work of a doctor who once claimed dreams were not generated by the mind, but received from somewhere hungry.

Then the house begins to shed. Wallpaper sloughs off like dead skin. Rooms appear with warm breath behind the walls. Each night, Mara wakes to find her body subtly changed and her journal filled with entries in her handwriting that she cannot recall writing. As storms sever the island from the mainland, Mara discovers Halcyon was built around something ancient, something that wears buildings the way parasites wear shells—and it has been dreaming of her for years.