The House That Wore Our Faces

When disgraced grief counselor Mara Venn inherits Harrowmere, a rotting seaside asylum converted into a family mansion, she plans to sell it before winter storms cut the peninsula off from the mainland. But the house knows her. It creaks with her dead husband’s voice, rearranges rooms into scenes from her patients’ traumas, and leaves wet footprints outside her locked bedroom door—footprints that match people who died decades ago.

Trapped by a storm with her estranged teenage daughter, a charming local historian, and a crew of desperate contractors, Mara discovers Harrowmere was built above something older than the coast itself: a drowned intelligence that feeds on memory and grows bodies from guilt. Each night, the house chooses someone to imitate. Each morning, the survivors find another face blooming in the walls.

As Mara’s journal begins describing events before they happen, she must confront the possibility that she never inherited Harrowmere at all. She may have been born inside it, dreamed into flesh by a hunger wearing her life.