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Your next favorite book
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by C. J. Dotson
A spine-chilling, heart-pounding suburban horror novel at the heart of the genre, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Catriona Ward.
In 1998, desperate loneliness pushes preteen Amber to ignore the misgivings of her family, particularly her younger sister, when she befriends the troubled new kid in the neighborhood―a boy with dead eyes, a fascination with fire, and no remorse. Their turbulent relationship is brief but creates lasting consequences.
Twenty-two years later, in 2020, he resurfaces to kill Amber's parents, and is in turn betrayed by his accomplice and killed in Amber's childhood home.
After the deaths, Amber inherits the house and, in an effort to save money, moves in with her husband and two children, hoping to reclaim some sense of stability in the grief and chaos surrounding her. Instead, she finds that the familiar walls are haunted by more than just bitter memories and lockdown stress. She shifts in and out of dreamlike trances, her reflection won't meet her gaze, and a menacing voice whispers to her from the gathering shadows. Although she tried to brush off the strange happenings as stress-fueled hallucinations, Amber is soon forced to admit that something much more real―and more dangerous―haunts her family. But Amber has deadly secrets of her own, and she must resolve these long-buried truths or lose the life she's contrived for herself.
"Dotson propels her tale to a pyrotechnic finale replete with shocking revelations that stretch credibility even as they make sense of the mystery. Readers able to set aside their skepticism will be pleased." —Publishers Weekly
"These Familiar Walls is further burning testament that the past won't only just haunt you, it'll come crashing like a blazing boomerang. C. J. Dotson sets her ghosts on fire and this haunting novel is an absolute incendiary sensation. You'll burn through this book or it'll burn right through you." ―Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
"With an atmosphere that's by turns domestic and delirious, Dotson's ability to find menace in the mundane is again unparalleled. The dual timeline is at once lingering and propulsive, the figurative claustrophobia of a suburban childhood mirrored perfectly in the pandemic lockdown of the book's present day setting. Tightly plotted, and twisted in the best possible way, These Familiar Walls with linger with you long after you've turned its final page." ―MK Hardy, author of The Needfire
This information about These Familiar Walls 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.
C. J. Dotson possesses the statistically average number of body parts for a human being to have. She and her husband, stepson, and children (all of whom also appear human) share a cabin in the woods with more bugs than she would ever like to see. In her limited spare time she enjoys reading, video games, painting, baking and decorating cakes (with…questionable success), and petting her dog and two cats.
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