Keep The Last Lantern Lit: A Novel

A small town keeps one light burning so the rest of them never have to.When Wren Calder comes home to bury her mother, she expects grief, paperwork, and a house she hasn't set foot in for eleven years. She doesn't expect the jack-o'-lanterns already lit three weeks early, or the locked drawer that gives up a two-hundred-year-old ledger, or the iron post at the edge of the yard that the whole town seems to be quietly, carefully avoiding.Every Halloween, for as long as anyone can remember, a woman of the Calder line has stood alone at that post from dusk until dawn, tending the one flame the town leaves burning after every other light goes dark. It isn't decoration. It's a debt - and it's about to become Wren's to pay.The deeper she digs, the more she understands why her mother never explained it, and why no one in Widow's Notch will say her father's name. He didn't leave them, the way she was always told. He went out to help with a dying flame thirty years ago, and he never came back - and something out past the tree line has been waiting, very patiently, for the night the light goes out again.Keep the Last Lantern Lit is a slow-burn folk horror novel about inherited grief, small-town secrets, and the price of the debts we agree to pay so no one else has to - for readers who loved the quiet dread of The Ritual, the small-town folklore of Mexican Gothic, and the family-legacy horror of The Grip of It.The lantern has to stay lit until dawn. No matter what stands at the glass. No matter whose face it wears.