Haunted House Flipping: An Appalachian Gothic Horror Novel

Priscilla Anwar has twelve thousand followers, six failed businesses, and one last idea. She buys the Ellery Estate at a county auction for twelve thousand dollars. Forty-one rooms, a slate roof, an 1888 brick tower, and a dead-end road outside a West Virginia town that emptied when the limestone works closed. Thirty days to flip it. Every mistake on camera. The house is glad to have her. Her first night there she sleeps nine hours, which she has not managed in years. Her bitten nails start to grow. The scar across her palm stops aching. A patch of the parlor floor reads ninety-eight degrees in a house with no heat, and the radiators tick all night with the boiler capped. Her contractor goes down into the cellar once and will not go down again. Everything she repairs in order to sell comes apart by morning. Nine people have owned the Ellery. The county’s own cards say each of them lived there about a month, and every card ends with the same two words. Moved away. The ninth was a flipper with a channel of her own. Her videos are still up. She looks wonderful in the last ones. Priscilla’s reveal day and her thirtieth day fall on the same date. She set that deadline herself, in red marker, on the first afternoon. Now the house has started speaking to her in her dead father’s voice, and it wants to know why she would leave, when she is finally close to finishing something. A slow-burn haunted house novel about grief, craft, and being cared for by something that will not let you go. Content note: supernatural horror, grief, and psychological manipulation. No on-page violence or gore. No harm to children or animals.