how to live with a ghost
A little haunted. A lot of heart.
HOW TO LIVE WITH A GHOST, a Gothic horror novel with heart and humor in the vein of T. Kingfisher and Grady Hendrix
Tess needs a quiet, fresh start and for the walls around her past to stay firmly intact. Unfortunately, the place she chooses for her new life of solitude is a crumbling Victorian already occupied by a ghost with a very firm rule: no one can live in the house longer than twenty-one days. Enter the nosy, dying neighbor who offers questionable help, blueberry muffins, and a suspicious history with both the house and its ghost.
As the haunting escalates and anyone Tess lets inside finds themselves in danger, it becomes a race against time to figure out how to live with a ghost instead of running from one. But when Tess outstays her twenty-one days, the house stops letting her leave. Her survival depends on uncovering not only the truth about what happened within these walls, but the truth of her own past. What she finds will change everything.
Excerpt
The house winks at me with a plywood eye and I wink back. I respect a lady who can lose a fight with gravity and keep flirting. Three stories of Victorian drama, Queen Anne bones under contractor sins, cast a long shadow in the autumn light. I am eager to get inside in spite of fish-scale shingles shedding like a molting beast and the decaying porch slumped around soot-darkened brick in a tired hug.
I haven’t identified good reasons, only a reckless certainty: mine. It has to be here. This house has to be mine. The sooner it’s official, the sooner I can begin the rest of my life, solo, quiet, nobody telling me where the sofa goes.
But other people do exist. And too many of them are here right now.
It seems half of this small Ohio town has drifted onto the lawn in jackets and ball caps. I’ve identified two species: the Serious Buyer with their squint, money’s-no-issue, clipboard energy, and the Oh-I-Just-Happened-By with hands in pockets and “what’s all this then?” on their raised eyebrows. Neither is real. They circled the date and told the cul-de-sac over fences taller than their small town secrets. Judging by the chatter, they’re here for a spectacle.
I catch bits of their chatter as I stand still as a statue in the dying grass.
Cursed since. The baby. Theresa.
As if on cue, children’s sing-song voices reach us on the breeze.
Terror Theresa, don’t you stare,
wrapped her baby up in hair
I tug my jacket closed and smile. Perfect. A house with baggage. I know what to do with baggage: I put it in boxes and stack it where it can’t trip me.