When madness is your inheritance, how do you escape it?

Scott Mast thought he got away-first from a family haunted by a dark fate, then from a dull career writing greeting cards in Seattle. But now he has come back to his New Hampshire hometown only to find that his family is in ruins, his nephew needs a home, and a shattering truth is clawing its way into the light.

Fifteen years ago, Scott's mother died in a fire. And now the shadowy circumstances-the bodies buried beneath the ashes, the lives ripped apart that fateful day-are starting to be revealed. The answers unspool in the pages of a peculiar old manuscript-an unfinished ghost story written in his father's own hand that beckons Scott out to a strange house in the woods with a lightless corridor that cannot be seen from the outside. Here Scott Mast will uncover all that has been hidden-and perhaps finish his father's unspeakable work.