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A Novel
by Donyae Coles
Set in a foreboding Gothic mansion and infused with the heightened paranoia and creeping horror of novels like Catherine House and Crimson Peak, a spine-chilling debut historical thriller from a fresh voice in the genre that will leave you questioning who, or what, you can trust ... including your own sanity.
England, 1840. Orabella Mumthrope spies an unexpected visitor in her uncle's parlor. Scruffy in appearance yet claiming to be the scion of a fabulously wealthy family, Elias Blakersby declares a deep desire to make Orabella his wife. The orphaned daughter of a white man and a Black woman—an outsider with no fortune or connections—Orabella never expected to marry. But her uncle has many debts, and Orabella, curious about the seeming devotion Elias bestows upon her, agrees.
The new bride is quickly whisked away to Korringhill Manor, the Blakersby family estate, and far from everything she knows. Expecting splendor, Orabella is shocked to find decay, skittish servants, and curt elders. But her kind new husband's loving touch, promises of a happy life together, and his assurances she'll never want for anything soothe her concerns.
Yet there is a darkness deep within this house. Rooms are locked or hidden away, and the walls seem to thrum with secrets. Orabella can never venture outside unattended; she spends her days having tea with a catatonic sister-in-law and evenings at Elias's side, dutifully hosting lavish dinners. The darkness soon begins to engulf her, too. Becoming dizzy and drowsy after dinner, she falls into a fitful sleep filled with macabre dreams, and is awakened by blood-curdling screams in the night. In the morning she rises from her bed covered in mysterious bruises. Confused and terrified, she begins to question where her dreams end and reality begins. The longer Orabella stays in this place, the more she loses parts of herself ... how long until she no longer exists?
Midnight Rooms is a sweeping saga with supernatural undertones set in Victorian England. Vibrating with tension, richly atmospheric—haunted by ghosts, guilt, and familial bonds—it is an electrifying story that will linger in your dreams.
"Coles's prose is evocative and strange and pairs brilliantly with the Gothic tropes she expertly deploys. This is a fever dream of a novel that readers won't want to wake up from." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Coles's novel is another stellar example of how marginalized voices are taking a perennially popular genre, previously dominated by white characters and authors, and revitalizing it for 21st-century readers in a manner that honors its history but injects brand-new terrors, similar to Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas." —Library Journal
"Coles turns the typical fairy tale upside down and inside out and back again. The novel shifts to something like a fever dream, as Orabella's visions of her life in the manor dissolve inside what seems to be a 'court of fairies and monsters.' Therein lies the confusion of Midnight Rooms, and in it, a dark mystery unravelling across its pages--what is Orabella's imagination, and what is real?... With vivid and gory detail, Midnight Rooms is a genre-spanning work of history and horror, fantasy and fairy tale, that pulses with a dark energy from start to unsettling finish." —Shelf Awareness
"An immersive horror fairy tale marrying Crimson Peak to Pan's Labyrinth upon strange foundations. You're never really safe here, with Midnight Rooms wondrously defying expectations and refusing obedience. Donyae Coles leads us into a house of sinister magic, full of corners for peeking around, but careful—these walls have claws. A feverish, labyrinthine debut." —Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth
"An overwhelming sense of unease and rich atmosphere practically drip from every page in this disquieting and equally compelling debut novel from a new, devastatingly original voice in speculative fiction. In Midnight Rooms, Donyae Coles has crafted a superb and intricately layered fever dream that I continue to think about long after having closed the book." —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
"A hallucinatory Gothic nightmare, at once beautiful, cruel, and feral." —Eden Royce, award-winning author of Root Magic
This information about Midnight Rooms was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Donyae Coles is an artist and a writer whose work is speculative in nature. She's been published in Fantasy Magazine, The Root, Pseudopod, and other publications. As a visual artist she works in traditional media, mainly watercolor, acrylic, and ink.
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