Showing results by publisher "Wildfire" in Gothic

Twelve-year-old Phoebe's world is falling apart. It's the summer of 1985 and she has just buried her parents, a fire at their family home claiming both in a freak accident. Her life is uprooted in an instant, and she takes little solace in the fact that her uncle Louis and aunt Maude have generously offered to take her in at their home in the Welsh woods. Under the summer sun, though, Phoebe falls into the rhythm of life with her eccentric guardians in their curious idyllic home, the hum of her aunt Maude's beehives filling the air.

Every night, in the college's ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn't there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?

In a mysterious apartment filled with ghosts, our unnamed narrator attempts to explain this to her child - how do I talk about this? she wonders. The truth must become something beautiful. We must begin with a fairy tale. And so she begins to construct a beautiful fairy tale for her child - one that begins with a strange baby boy whose nails grow too fast and whose skin smells of soil. As he grows from a boy into a man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere.