The Awakening
A Novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
It was supposed to be a time for healing. But it soon turned to horror.
Paul and Penny Mason are spending the summer at the family lake house with their troubled, teenage daughter, Elsie, in a last-ditch effort to save their crumbling marriage. But the tension between them only thickens when they arrive at their once-idyllic summer home, a place that now feels eerily cold and darkly foreboding.
It quickly becomes clear that all is not right. Penny is plagued by horrific, recurring nightmares. Paul and Elsie are surprised by the curious appearance of a sad, strange woman—a woman who purports to know them, but who calls them by names that are not their own. The mystery only deepens when they discover an antique box in the house. Inside is a photo of the woman, alive in a distant past. Who is she? And what is the source of the seeping, chilly discomfort that has suddenly settled over the family? The answer lies within Penny’s disturbing dreams and Elsie’s fragile emotional state—and when long-buried secrets reveal themselves, it will be the most frightening day of their lives. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turning out novels on a near annual basis, this rising star of fantasy suspense abandons ancient Egypt (The Alchemist) for a satisfying, old-fashioned ghost story with a touch of violence and mayhem. Mary is an amnesiac who wakes up in a sanitarium with no sense of her past other than the dim memory of an incident that took the lives of her physician husband and daughter. Her psychotherapist at the sanitarium convinces her that her family isn't literally dead, and she moves into what she thinks is her lakeside house near Chapel Hill, N.C., hoping that its occupants a frustrated writer and his rebellious teenage daughter, both spending the summer there are her family. It gradually becomes clear that Mary is a ghost. The daughter, Elsie, sees her but can't speak to her. The father, Paul, encounters the ghost and actually converses with her. When his wife, Penny, a prominent surgeon, joins her family at the summer house, she has terrifying dreams of blood splattered about the kitchen. As Mary struggles to communicate with the house's isolated, unhappy occupants, they themselves fail to communicate with one another Paul is miserable over his flagging career; Penny, preoccupied with her work, barely has time for the family; and Elsie is bitterly estranged from both of them. The author slowly reveals the ties between Mary's family and the one she has adopted, and Paul, Penny and Elsie begin to draw together as they research their mysterious visitor. This is a well-told tale with a shocking final revelation.
