Tag: Katrina Leno

She couldn’t remember the first book she had eaten.

Jane North-Robinson is moving across country with her mother Ruth, after her father died and left them with no money. With no other option on the horizon, her mother decided to sell their house and go back to her childhood home, a place she hates and had promised never to go back to. North Manor is big, dark, full of broken windows and strange noises, and in the backyard there are huge rosebushes blooming out of season.

Jane is grieving for her father, but she does her best to adjust to her new life. She makes new friends at school, while at the same time becoming the target for the town bully and struggling to cope with her rising anger. Only her father and her books can calm her down, and now he’s gone. Whenever she’s upset, she picks up one of her childhood books and starts eating a page, slowly, feeling her anger fading as the paper settles in her stomach.

But anger is not her only issue. The house is getting to her: the strange noises, like steps on the upper floor; the lights flickering on and off in one of the empty rooms; the roses growing back wild and black after her mother cut down the bushes. She starts blacking out from time to time, and comes back to consciousness to find messages she doesn’t remember ever sending. Her mother feels far away, buried in her new job and evading Jane’s questions about the house and her past. It all seems to point to the “storage room” her mother keeps locked, and when Jane finally finds the courage to open the door, she doesn’t find piles of boxes inside, but instead a little girl’s room left untouched for years.

Continue reading Horrid by Katrina Leno