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A Novel
by Sean David Robinson
Book Reviewed by:A man returns to his strange hometown twenty years after his mother climbed a staircase in the wilderness and disappeared in this speculative mystery where We Used to Live Here meets The Midnight Library.
As a boy, Nico once accompanied his mother on a research trip to investigate a stalled migration of monarch butterflies. One night, upon hearing her sneak out of their rented cabin, he followed her to a clearing in the forest where a famed mansion once stood. Paralyzed with fear, he watched his mother climb a staircase and vanish, along with the stairs and the strange glowing door at its peak. No one believed his story, and as he grew older, he too stopped believing it was real.
As an adult, Nico returns to his hometown to care for his ailing father. But something strange is happening to the town. There are unexplained power fluctuations, people are going missing, and, reportedly, phantoms are roaming the woods. When Nico finds his mother's field journal from the week she disappeared, including her account of the vanishing staircase, he begins to pick apart the mystery.
All the tangled strings trail back to the same starting point: the Gilded Age family whose mansion burned down under mysterious circumstances in those very same woods where his mother vanished.
Equally a compelling mystery and a moving story of family and destiny, this speculative novel will spellbind readers of Emily St. John Mandel and Susanna Clarke.
he debut novel of Sean David Robinson, The Door in Penrose Forest is the kind of mystery that lets you enjoy the journey as much as the destination... it's great fun to let yourself be taken on the ride alongside Nico, whose attempts to wrap himself around the one puzzle that's been hanging over his head virtually his entire life result in mystery, peril, and, eventually, something like closure...continued
Full Review
(498 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Abby Geni, author of The Wildlands and Children of the Wolf
The Door In Penrose Forest is the most captivating novel I have read in years. It has everything: stunning beauty, wry humor, a gripping plot, and a premise that will break your brain in the best of ways. Sean David Robinson is a brilliant new voice in fiction. You should read this book immediately. Marc Guggenheim, Emmy Award–winning writer and author of In a Lifetime
A delightful and compelling modern day fable with touches of Lost and The Prestige that had me breathlessly turning the pages.
In The Door in Penrose Forest, the Penrose in question, lending his name to the forest, the city near it, and the ruined mansion at the heart of the intrigue, was Cornelius Penrose, a robber baron from the Gilded Age who used his vast fortune to enrich the area surrounding Penrose (then called Williamsville) before a massive flood devastated the area; not long thereafter, a mysterious fire reduced his palatial estate almost completely to ash. The reader eventually finds out what happened, parceled out in alternating chapters with Nico's story.
The Gilded Age was, of course, a time when mostly-unscrupulous men accumulated then-unimaginable amounts of wealth, which they used to build some things for the people (museums, libraries) but...
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