The Keeper

The dreams of a dying rural town are haunted by the town pariah—and soon become waking nightmares—in this novel from the Bram Stoker Award–winning author.

The formerly prosperous paper mill town of Bedford, Maine, has fallen on hard times. With the mill closed, nobody’s making ends meet. What’s worse, lately the people are dreaming about Susan Marley, a young woman fallen from grace whom they pity and fear.

No one talks about the dreams even though they all share them. It’s a delicate balance. An unspoken devil’s pact. But when Susan mysteriously dies during a weeklong rainstorm, those nightmares start to come true. Only the guilt-riddled people who once loved Susan can guess at what’s happening, or act to stop it.

“Langan combines a genuinely poetic sensibility with a taste for horror’s most bravura excesses, which gives her book a distinct and juicy flavor all its own.” —Peter Straub, New York Times–bestselling author

“In vivid, compelling prose, which runs from the wry to the lyrical, Langan here gives us nothing less than a sharply realized portrait of an American town in the death-throes of decay. Susan Marley is a subtle juggernaut of a character—and she inhabits the mind once you’ve finished like a dark, lingering smoke.” —Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door