The Crimson Side

You can go home again. Something there has been waiting for you to try.At forty-five, Denny has run clean out of second acts. The marriage is over. Fourteen years in a jail control room are behind him. Nineteen years of self-published horror novels sit unread in a footlocker at the foot of the twin bed in his mother's house - the same house, the same lemon tree, the same crack in the driveway he used to jump his bike over when he was eleven and immortal. Moving home was supposed to be surrender.Then he meets Ara - sharp, funny, impossible to talk himself small in front of - and Serenity, whose Tuesday photography class gives him a reason to leave the house again. For the first time in years, the door to the life Denny gave up on creaks back open.But there's a house at the edge of town that smells of roses no one planted, and the woman who lives there has been patient for a very long time. Something wore this town thin thirty-one years ago. It remembers the boy who used to live here. And it has been saving a face he loves for last.For readers of Stephen King's Bag of Bones and Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House - quiet, character-first horror about grief, unfinished things, and the terrible mercy of being asked to be brave one last time.