Over the holidays, the hot new cover for my next full-length novel dropped - and I didn’t want it to get lost in any festive shuffles, so here we go! Do you recall awhile back, when I went on that writer field trip with my pal Kat Richardson? To refresh your memory: we trekked out to the far side of Puget Sound to set eyes on a weird little island where I’d decided to set a weird little haunted house story.
I’d never been to this island before. I found it while poking around on GoogleMaps looking for a localish island that had a cool name and a highly remote location. A very scientific approach, yes. Haha. Cough cough. Anyway.
Welcome to Marrowstone.
A box of advance reader copies for a haunted house/gothic northwestern rural island thriller THE DROWNING HOUSE, coming in July.
Before I launch into a little context, with pics and everything - let me take the opportunity to offer up some preorder links. Why? Because preorders are the life or death of a book (and sometimes a career), and this one only has six months or so to rack up some numbers. That may sound like a lot of time, but it’s… not, really.
So what’s this one about? Well, I’ll tell ya.
A violent storm washes a mysterious house onto a rural Pacific Northwest beach, stopping the heart of the only woman who knows what it means. Her grandson, Simon Culpepper, vanishes in the aftermath, leaving two of his childhood friends to comb the small, isolated island for answers--but decades have passed since Melissa and Leo were close, if they were ever close at all.
Now they'll have to put aside old rivalries and grudges if they want to find or save the man who brought them together in the first place--and on the way they'll learn a great deal about the sinister house on the beach, the man who built it, and the evil he's bringing back to Marrowstone Island…
::insert Stephan voice:: This book has everything: mid-century modern architecture, boulders that wander around, a power-hungry architect who summons old gods, secretive geriatric Scandinavian witches who become even more powerful after they die, and not one but two houses that are miserably haunted - each in their own terrible way. And a helpful troll. Yeah, I’m serious. I went full Nordic Weird with this one.*
Just add two friends with old conflicts and good intentions, hoping to find their childhood buddy on an island that hasn’t even noticed he’s missing… and we’re off to the races!
Preorder The Drowning House at Amazon
Preorder The Drowning House at Barnes & Noble
Preorder The Drowning House at Target
Preorder The Drowning House at Wal-Mart
Preorder The Drowning House at Indiebound
If you are so inclined, and if you would be so generous, and if you’d like a fresh and strange take on the haunted house trope… please consider preordering! All you nice folks who ask for sequels, and more books, and all that jazz: this is how you make that happen! You preorder books! It helps give the publisher an idea of the demand, and can mean the difference between a success and a failure in the market.
Right. With all that shameless self-promotion out of the way, back to shenanigans and pictures, like I promised. ::vanishes in a poof of black glitter::
This is the bridge to Indian Island. That’s how you get to Marrowstone, too - you take this bridge, cross Indian Island, and then there’s a smaller bridge on that one that goes to Marrowstone… but this one is more picturesque, heh. There’s no ferry, and no other access to either island.
In the past, I’ve lived in places this rural (or nearly so), and it’s always strange and tricky, trying to explain it to folks whose idea of being in “the country” is perhaps a distant national park or maybe the far end of the suburbs. I’ve lived in the country more than once. And I’ve lived in The Boonies like Marrowstone, too.
Like everyplace else, there are perks and drawbacks alike.
Marrowstone Island is a only about six square miles of earth in total. It’s a long, skinny island, so there’s a lot of beachfront property and a lot of privacy - with little apart from a state park and a camping ground at the northern point to draw in visitors (mostly seasonal campers, out at the old military fort). It’s a lovely, rural, quiet place - but it’s not a good place to have an emergency.
There are no medical services, no cops, no fire-fighters, and until the general store burned down in 2020, it didn’t even have postal service except by general delivery. (These days, everyone’s address is for “Nordland,” after the guy who opened the general store, which was called “Nordy’s.”)
The island is roughly 3-4 hours away from Seattle, though when someone noted that “But as the crow flies, it’s not even a hundred miles away!” I was compelled to point out out that a crow can hypothetically fly across the Sound; two middle-aged ladies in a car have to either take a ferry and then drive another 2 hours, or drive south around the bottom end of the Sound, then north again. Either way, the travel time is about the same.
Kat R. on the left, me on the right. I am not taller than Kat. We’re about the same size, but you know how selfies go.
I have a shared iCloud album with all the pics, and I’m not confident that you’ll be able to see them, but here goes nothing, if you’re curious: Writer Field Trip to Marrowstone Island. And no, I did not go out of my way to take pictures with zero people in them. There were simply zero people around to wander into a photograph. We barely set eyes on anybody the entire time we were on the island (two days).
Basically, it was perfect. Exactly what I needed, from a narrative standpoint. So distant. So rural. So vaguely sinister, in the rough fall weather. So sincerely sinister, in the rough fall weather with no people around. I think even the nearest gas station is half a dozen miles away. (Kat and I stayed in a hotel in Port Hadlock, the closest town. In 2020, there were no accommodations on the island except a sketchy AirB&B or two. There might be more now, I don’t know.)
The beaches are covered with all kinds of neat stuff, mostly driftwood and rocks and strange plants and little scuttling critters and all that good, ocean-smelling stuff. I’m not looking to live in The Boonies again, but if I were - and if I were personally invested in the aesthetics of driftwood - I could see myself living here. It’s really gorgeous.
At any rate, if you want to see all the pics from our adventures, try clicking that link above. We adventured so hard, you guys. That night when we settled into our room, we were both soaked to the bone and sat around in our hotel room in PJs with all our clothes and outerwear (and shoes) hanging up around the quasi-pot-belly iron furnace that our room somehow had on hand. It was an old industrial alcohol plant, converted to lodging. God only knows.
Thanks for reading this far, everyone - and thanks so much for any and all preorders, because they’re what keep a career rolling. Here’s one last pic of our setting, with a good message for 2024.
Driftwood on a beach, with a small handmade sign that reads “TELL THE TRUTH.”
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Note: I am predominantly of Scandinavian descent, and there are many of us out in this corner of the country; I thought it would be fun and interesting to make use of the heritage and lore.