In the Shadow of Spindrift House, Signed Limited Edition

Dust jacket illustration by Julie Dillon.

We’re proud to present a new 36,000 word novella by Mira Grant, best-selling author of the Newsflesh series. Her previous novellas for us, Rolling in the Deep, Final Girls, and Kingdom of Needle and Bone all sold out quickly, so don’t hesitate to lock in your copy of In the Shadow of Spindrift House.

If you'd like your number of Spindrift to match your number of Kingdom of Needle and Bone, please mention this in the comment field when placing your order.

About the Book:

Nature abhors a straight line. The natural world is a place of curves and softened edges, of gentle mists and welcoming spirals. Nature remembers deviation; nature does not forgive.

For Harlowe Upton-Jones, life has never been a straight line. Shipped off to live with her paternal grandparents after a mysterious cult killed her mother and father, she has grown up chasing the question behind the curve, becoming part of a tight-knit teen detective agency. But “teen” is a limited time offer, and when her friends start looking for adult professions, it’s up to Harlowe to find them one last case so that they can go out in a blaze of glory.

Welcome to Spindrift House.

The stories and legends surrounding the decrepit property are countless and contradictory, but one thing is clear: there are people willing to pay a great deal to determine the legal ownership of the house. When Harlowe and her friends agree to investigate the mystery behind the manor, they do so on the assumption that they’ll be going down in history as the ones who determined who built Spindrift House—and why. The house has secrets. They have the skills. They have a plan. They have everything they need to solve the mystery.

Everything they need except for time. Because Spindrift House keeps its secrets for a reason, and it has no intention of letting them go.

Nature abhors a straight line.

Here’s where the story bends.

Limited:1500 signed numbered hardcover copies

From Publishers Weekly:

“Stranger Things fans are likely to be engrossed by Grant’s seductive account of four teens who band together to solve paranormal mysteries… Grant makes the horrors of Spindrift House palpable. Gradually readers come to understand the implications of the entrancing opening passage about humanity’s imposition of the ‘mathematical aberration of the straight line’ on nature. This strong standalone from Grant (the Newsflesh series) will satisfy fans of classic tales of horror and the eldritch.”

In the Shadow of Spindrift House

(excerpt)

Chapter 1:

The House of Angles

1.

Nature is a force of curves and spirals, of soft, radial lines feeding, one into the other, to form an interconnected web of compatible shapes. There are no straight lines in the organic world, only those which, through proximity to the softness around them, present the illusion of the ruler’s edge. There is a curvature to the spine, the long bones of leg and thigh, the cutting surface of a tooth. Even the spider’s web, vaunted architectural miracle of the insect world, is curve upon curve upon curve when looked at with a discerning eye.

In all the natural world, only three things may build toward true straightness, true defiance of the organic curl. Crystals seek a stark, lifeless geometry, line leading into line leading into hard, unforgiving angle. Viruses, which may be said to bridge the gap between the unliving, unthinking mineral and the hot, ceaseless tempo of the animal world, form viciously sharpened cutting edges, turning their own mindless bodies into weapons.

And then there is the human race.

See how they build, planning their domiciles with care, measuring and cutting and planing until every line is straight, every angle is exact. They compete to build the straightest wall, the tallest spire, they cloak their organic curvature in line upon line upon line, and then they look upon the natural world—the natural world, which came before them, which birthed them, which will endure long after they are gone—and they judge it twisted and terrible, exclaim with disgust at the way it curves, the way it twists. They hate its softness, and hide their own behind wool and cotton, linen and canvas. They straighten their spines with braces and corsets, chase the curves from their limbs, conceal what cannot be made straighter, deny their origins, deny their eventual endings.

Humanity is an aberration, an affront upon all that is right and true and holy.

Is it any wonder, then, that the natural world, so hated, so denied, should look upon humanity with narrowed, furious eyes, should view humanity’s rejection of the very forms which bore it as a betrayal never to be forgiven? And is it any wonder, with these things accepted and known, that that same natural world should look upon humanity and ask itself, in rage and in genuine wonder, if there might not be a way to cleanse this scourge from the broad back of the breathing, living, soft and curving world?

All time is limited. All time is passing. As humanity builds straight walls on bending, bowing cliffs and along the lines of rolling hills, that time passes even faster, offended until it flees into the future, where straight lines sag, where angles bend and break and fall apart, where the softness, freed from its geometrical bindings, can finally run free. This, then, is the punishment for those harsh lines, for those unforgiving angles: that humanity’s time should run fast and hot and short, at least when compared to the other thinking peoples of the world, whose time is slow and cool and long, whose days are counted without number, and whose palaces, when they rise, rise in sweet, organic spirals, forgiving and forgiven by the eyes of the world.

Humanity has sacrificed so much on the altar of geometry, sacrificing eons untold to the mathematical aberration of the straight line, the perfect angle. Perhaps one day, they will see the error of their ways.

Perhaps one day, they will come home.