These Fleeting Shadows
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3.1 • 10 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The Haunting of Hill House meets Knives Out in a bid for an inheritance that will leave Helen Vaughan either rich...or dead.
Helen Vaughan doesn't know why she and her mother left their ancestral home at Harrowstone Hall, called Harrow, or why they haven't spoken to their extended family since. So when her grandfather dies, she's shocked to learn that he has left everything—the house, the grounds, and the money—to her. The inheritance comes with one condition: she must stay on the grounds of Harrow for one full year, or she'll be left with nothing.
There is more at stake than money. For as long as she can remember, Harrow has haunted Helen's dreams—and now those dreams have become a waking nightmare. Helen knows that if she is going to survive the year, she needs to uncover the secrets of Harrow. Why is the house built like a labyrinth? What is digging the holes that appear in the woods each night?And why does the house itself seem to be making her sick?
With each twisted revelation, Helen questions what she knows about Harrow, her family, and even herself. She no longer wonders if she wants to leave…but if she can.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Helen Vaughan, 17, doesn't know why people instinctively dislike her, nor why she's plagued by peculiar dreams of her family's ancestral home, in Marshall's (Our Last Echoes) pulse-pounding horror novel. Helen also can't remember why she and her mother fled Harrowstone Hall (dubbed "Harrow"), their family's historic estate, when Helen was seven, but she suspects the issues interrelate. Her mother hasn't spoken with Helen's grandparents in a decade, so it's a shock when, upon her grandfather's death, he leaves both Harrow and his $40 million estate to Helen. To inherit it, however, she must live in Harrow for one year. Determined to learn why the house haunts her dreams, Helen, aided by her cousins and an enigmatic "Harrow Witch," agrees, but when she starts falling ill, losing time, and seeing monsters that inexplicably disappear, she worries she may not live long enough to find out. While Harrow's mythos is muddled, complex plotting, nightmarish imagery, and haunting prose, coupled with Helen's equal parts anxious and driven first-person narrative, buoy Marshall's mystifying tale. One Vaughan cousin is Black; all other characters cue as white. Ages 14–up.
