Paranormal, Mystery, Thriller, 336 pagesPublished September 5, 2023 by Berkley
A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.
When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.
Margaret is not most people.
Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.
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Excerpt
The walls of the house were bleeding again.
This sort of thing could be expected; it was,
after all, September.
The bleeding wouldn't have been so bad if it
hadn't been accompanied by nightly moaning that escalated into screaming by the
end of the month like clockwork. The moaning started around midnight and didn't
let up until nearly six in the morning, which made it challenging to get a good
night's sleep. Since it was early in the month, I could still sleep through the
racket, but the sleep was disjointed and not particularly restful.
Before Hal absconded to wherever it was he went,
he used to stretch and crack what sounded like the entirety of his skeleton.
Margaret, he would say, we're getting old.
Speak for yourself, I would reply, but he was
right. I was starting to feel a bit like the house itself sometimes-grand but
withering, shifting in the wind and making questionable noises when the
foundation settled. All the moaning-and-screaming business in September certainly
didn't help me feel any younger.
That is to say, I was not looking forward to
late September and the nightly screaming. It was going to be a long month. But
that's just the way of things.
As for the bleeding, it always started at the
top floor of the house-the master bedroom. If I wasn't mistaken, it started
above our very bed itself. There was something disconcerting about opening your
eyes first thing in the morning and seeing a thick trail of red oozing down
your nice wallpaper, pointing straight at your head. It really set a mood for
the remainder of the day. Then you walked out into the hallway and there was
more of it dripping from in between the cracks in the wallpaper, leaking
honey-slow to the floor. It was a lot to take in before breakfast.
As early as it was in September, the blood
hadn't yet made it to the baseboards. Give it a week, however, and it would
start pooling on the floor, cascading down the stairs in clotting red
waterfalls. By the end of the month, deft footwork would be required to walk
down the hallway or descend the stairs without leaving a trail of prints
throughout the house. I had grown practiced in dodging blood over the past few
years, but even I had slipped up on occasion, especially once the screaming was
in full effect. Sleep deprivation really takes a toll on your motor
functioning.
I used to worry over the walls, getting a bucket
and soap and scrubbing until my arms were sore, only to see my work undone
before my eyes. I would rub the sponge over a crack in the wallpaper and watch
a fresh blob of red leak out of the open wound that was the wall over and over
again. The wallpaper is ruined, I fretted, but it never was. It all went away
in October. So now I just allowed the walls to bleed and waited patiently.
The first year we were in the house, Hal tried
to convince me that the bleeding was just a leak. An oozing red leak. He
carried on with that line of reasoning much longer than was logical. By the
time the blood poured down the stairs and Hal was almost ready to admit that
maybe it wasn't a simple leak, October hit and the blood vanished. Hal
considered it a problem solved. I suppose he thought it was an isolated event
and never considered that such a thing might be cyclical. He seemed surprised
when the blood returned that second September. There's that leak again, he
mused, fooling nobody. Everything, of course, changed after the third
September, and Hal's opinions about the bleeding during this fourth September
could be best summed up by his abrupt absence. I supposed I ought to feel
trepidatious about facing September alone. However, I was never quite alone in
this house, now, was I?
Excerpted from The September House by Carissa
Orlando Copyright © 2023 by Carissa Orlando. Excerpted by permission of
Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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About the author
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| Photo credit: Cameron Massey |
Carissa Orlando has a doctorate in clinical-community psychology and specializes in work with children and adolescents. In her “day job,” Carissa works to improve the quality of and access to mental health care for children and their families.
Prior to her career in psychology, Carissa studied creative writing in college and has written creatively in some form since she was a child. It was only a matter of time before Carissa, an avid horror fan for much of her life, merged her understanding of the human psyche and deep love for storytelling into a piece of fiction.
Connect with Carissa
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