by DH
When the only shelter you can afford is slowly digesting you, how long do you stay? Delia Crane has nothing left. Her husband is dead, her savings consumed by medical bills, and she's been driving her two children from borrowed room to borrowed room for three years. So when a Nashville developer offers her a caretaking job at a century-old estate in the Tennessee foothills — housing included — she takes it. The house is beautiful, solid, warm. For the first time since she lost everything, Delia can set things down. But the property locals call "the Borrowing Place" doesn't haunt. It tenants. It wants people to stay, and it has been practicing for over a hundred years. As autumn deepens and the mountain road turns treacherous, Delia finds evidence of inhabitants who aren't there — warm mugs in locked rooms, beds slept in by no one. Her twelve-year-old son Josiah draws rooms he's never seen, his hands moving without his permission. And her seven-year-old daughter Ruthie befriends something she calls "the first guest" with the fearless openness of a child who hasn't learned what should be impossible. The house isn't evil. It's offering Delia exactly what she needs — a home. And the cost is everything else. The Borrowing Place is a Southern Gothic horror novel about grief, motherhood, and the price of shelter — where the most terrifying thing the house does is make the children happy.
by Derrick Walker
Ethan Cord arrives in Millhaven with a suitcase, a job offer he can't quite remember applying for, and eighteen months of memories that feel like they belong to someone else. The town is perfect. The kind of perfect that should make a man suspicious, except Ethan has been through something terrible he can't fully recall, and the kindness of strangers is the first thing that hasn't hurt in a long time. His cottage is furnished with things he would have chosen himself. His neighbors bring soup before he's unpacked. The archive job gives him structure, purpose, a reason to stay. And Nora — sharp, warm, disarmingly honest about the town's intensity — makes him feel like a person again for the first time since the breakdown erased who he used to be. But Ethan is a journalist by training, and journalists notice things. The archive holds a photograph dated 1952 of a man with his face. The locked basement of his cottage is lined with tally marks in handwriting that looks like his own. Every Sunday, the town gathers for dinner around a table with one empty chair, a full plate, and a question no one will answer. His memories are returning — but they feel less like recovery and more like something being fed to him on a schedule. And the Giving Season, the autumn celebration the town speaks of with quiet reverence, is five weeks away. In the hollows of Appalachia, the land provides. The land protects. And the land collects what it is owed. Some debts are paid in gratitude. Some are paid in blood. And some require you to walk willingly into the dark, believing you are finally going home.
