The Eternal Rose

Michael Denny is a drifter. He has spent forty-five years perfecting the art of vanishing — moving through towns without leaving a mark, keeping people at a distance, turning down the radio in his head that picks up emotions he has no right to carry. He is good at running. He has made it a science.

But when he sees an ad for handyman work in Highland, California, something catches. A thread he can't quite ignore pulls him toward a house that shouldn't exist in a drought-stricken valley — a Victorian estate surrounded by roses so lush and perfect they seem to bloom in defiance of every natural law.

The woman who answers the phone is named Helena. Her voice is warm and knowing, and something in it makes Michael feel, for the first time in decades, like someone is actually seeing him.

He should drive away. Every instinct honed by a lifetime of solitude screams at him to get back in the van and keep moving. But the thread is too tight now, and the weight of being truly seen — truly wanted — is heavier than his usual practice of disappearance.

Michael takes the job.

What he finds inside the house is a family — warm, welcoming, impossibly generous — who feed on their guests in ways that have nothing to do with food. He sees it first in the photographs that line the hallway: the same faces appearing across years, their smiles staying wide while their eyes go slowly, steadily empty. Then he sees it at a wake, where the family moves through rooms full of grieving people and collects what they have no right to take.

The Eternal Rose is a gothic paranormal horror novel about a man who is finally tired of running and a house that has been waiting centuries for someone broken enough to step inside. It is a story about the particular hunger of things that wear human faces, and about what it costs to stay when every instinct tells you to flee. And it is ultimately a love story — twisted, dark, and terrifying — between a man learning to feel again and the creature that has decided he is exactly what it has been hungry for.

For readers of Paul Tremblay, Stephen King's The Shining, and gothic romance with genuine horror at its heart.