The Chosen Tenant

Elliott's thoughts are becoming real. And the house has been waiting for someone like him.

Thirty-four-year-old technical writer Elliott has just started medication for his ADHD when strange things begin happening in his Victorian rental apartment. The house at [address] has a documented history: tenants who stay for decades, unexplained gaps, a fire in 1889 that burned and didn't burn simultaneously, and a 1927 suicide by threads of "unknown composition."

As Elliott researches the building's past, his executive dysfunction spirals. Browser tabs multiply. Spreadsheets tracking impossible patterns consume his days. His partner Alexis grows concerned. Work deadlines slip further away. And then Elliott discovers something worse than the house's dark history: his medicated brain is manifesting his thoughts into physical reality—and the house has been selecting tenants with this exact ability for over two hundred years.

What does a sentient Victorian house want with neurodivergent minds? And what happens when you can't stop thinking about the wrong things?

For readers who loved Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, and Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street, The Chosen Tenant is a literary horror novel about neurodivergence, reality-bending terror, and the spaces that choose us.

Content warnings: Body horror, reality distortion, anxiety/ADHD representation, psychological distress, self-harm themes