An obsessive young woman has been waiting half her life—since she was twelve years old—for this moment. She has planned. Researched. Trained. Imagined every scenario. Now she is almost certain the man who kidnapped and murdered her sister sits in the passenger seat beside her.
Carl Louis Feldman is a documentary photographer. The young woman claims to be his long-lost daughter. He doesn’t believe her. He claims no memory of murdering girls across Texas, in a string of places where he shot eerie pictures. She doesn’t believe him.
Determined to find the truth, she lures him out of a halfway house and proposes a dangerous idea: a ten-day road trip, just the two of them, to examine cold cases linked to his haunting photographs.
The Book Of Cold Cases By Simone St. James
Is he a liar or a broken old man? Is he a pathological con artist? Or is she? Julia Heaberlin once again swerves the serial killer genre in a new direction. With taut, captivating prose, Heaberlin deftly explores the ghosts that live in our minds—and the ones that stare back from photographs. You won’t see the final, terrifying twist spinning your way until the very last mile.
“The author wields words like weapons, with each one chosen to heighten tension, underscore emotion, or foreshadow doom. Keen character work further distinguishes the tale …. Heaberlin brilliantly combines travelogue with a heartbreaking portrait of the damage done by childhood trauma.”
“A rich hybrid work that’s at once a zany, dialogue-propelled two-hander, a murder mystery, a road novel, a pair of psychological case studies and a meditation on photography. It would make a fine indie movie, although screen adaptation would entail sacrificing Heaberlin’s evocative prose.”
Nothing But Blackened Teeth
“The tension crackles on the page…Heaberlin writes with passion and poetry about Texas, photography and the tragedy and comedy of dementia. As with her previous novel,
… Heaberlin isn’t as grimly fatalistic…her books pop with bursts of off-kilter humor…[she] anchors her books with troubled but endearingly badass women. Think Amy Schumer’s character in
, except with guns and the greater possibility of redemption. Yet like Highsmith, Heaberlin displays a keen grasp of the casual cruelty that defines human interaction, not to mention a flair for stories in which no one—least of all the protagonist—can be trusted…Texas has yet again bred a major American noir writer.”
E.l Ghost Face Costume Adult
“You’ll enjoy the journey and all its macabre side trips. You’ll love the travel commentary written in Heaberlin’s lean, muscular prose…. Signposts along the way warn of angst, secrets and deadly plot twists, but you’ll never see what’s coming. You’ll step out of this fictional vehicle feeling like you’ve been T-boned by an 18-wheeler.”
Is top-notch suspense, a dangerous game of hide-and-go-seek, masterfully crafted … Heaberlin conjures a foreboding atmosphere of exquisite tension…. Clues are dark, thin threads in a tangled bird’s nest; this is a mystery requiring your attention.”
Is an exceptional read, with a deftly woven plot—a book to devour in one sitting. This is breathless storytelling at its very best, with a deeply satisfying ending which will give books groups—and all your friends, when you recommend it—much to discuss.”
Rock Paper Scissors By Alice Feeney
“This book haunted me. Such a gripping exploration of obsession and loss: of those we love, but also our memories and sense of self. The writing is beautiful and chilling, laced with a subtle dark humour, and the multiple twists build to a perfect icy shiver of an ending. I loved it!”
“Heaberlin’s new psychological suspense novel takes readers across the vast and changing landscape of Texas, a perfect backdrop to the deteriorating mind of suspected killer Carl Louis Feldman. The timing is perfect, the layers of the story both peel away and deepen as the search into the mind of a killer takes turns no one is expecting.“
“Heaberlin’s spot-on depiction of mental anguish, her careful creation of characters who are mean and troubled yet compelling, and an unexpected twist at the end make this a winner; suggest it especially to patrons who like a Texas backdrop and or the work of Megan Abbott.”
Cursed Objects, And The Legends Behind Them
Is a stunner; a creepy, complicated thriller that crawls under your skin from the outset; the kind of ‘there’s no way is going to end well’ story in which you know that what the character is doing is a very, very bad idea, but you can’t look away. A chilling, nuanced, just-one-more-page thriller from a master of psychological suspense.”
Tackles the distressing subject of murder, and also dementia, with sensitivity and respect. The light and shade in the writing is mesmeric. Utterly compelling. I’m convinced if everybody had a Barfly in their life, the world would be a better place!”
Takes a deep dive into the murky well of moral ambiguity as one woman’s obsession with her missing sister collides with a serial killer’s dementia over the course of a thrill packed road trip deep in the heart of Texas. A novel that brilliantly asks you to question everything you see (and don’t see) around you.”
Ghost Forest: Atlas Of A Drowning World
Is the spellbinding, brilliantly original story of a young woman desperate to find her missing sister and the man she suspects knows the truth, joined together on a perilous journey as elusive and mysterious as the paper ghosts that lure them. Heaberlin’s love for Texas spills across every page.”
’ heroine cons a suspected serial killer claiming dementia into joining her on a road trip, in the hope of triggering his memories—and confessions—of what happened to several missing women. Their journey hurtles through Heaberlin’s vivid Texas towards a surprising and satisfying conclusion, guided by clues in enigmatic photographs. The trip is engrossing, tense, and tightly-written, with a luminous sense of place.”
This website uses cookies to improve functionality and performance. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to the use of cookies. OKPrivacy policyW e don't believe in ghosts, so writing ghost literature for a modern readership presents particular challenges. How does one write for an audience that is cynical, yet still wishes to be terrified? What exactly is a ghost, anyway?
The Secret Meaning Of Ghost Stories
We live in an age of reason, a more secular culture than that of those great ghost writers, the Victorians; we rely on the proofs and disproofs of science, psychology and medicine, on the digital recording of much of our lives. We live in brightly illuminated rooms on streets devoid of the terror of something moving just outside the lamp light. Wraiths don't tend to show up on CCTV cameras, holograms are explicable phantoms and we all know what Freud made of ghosts.
It was only after I was approached to write a novella with a supernatural aspect that I realised all my novels are haunted: by the past, by desire or by guilt. And so it took only a small shift to see that I could take this one step further. The ghosts should not be visible – at least not in any straightforward way. Who can forget Peter Quint standing outside the window in The Turn of the Screw? He is always at one remove: behind glass, or in the distance on a tower, just as his companion Miss Jessel is glimpsed on the other side of a lake. While writing
, it felt important to me that unexplained presences were not the walking dead, but were just perceived as sounds, scents or misidentifications; at most, they are reflections, or reported sightings, or something captured in the split second of a film still. As Roald Dahl boldly claimed: The best ghosts stories don't have ghosts in them. And, as Susan Hill says: Less is always more.
Best Ghost Books
The contemporary writer must trade on the power of anticipation, on the unnerving aspects of less obvious settings than candlelit wrecks in fog. I sought brightness for my unease: brilliant green grass and relentless sunshine, so the glimmer in the trees, the hint of eyes in a window, were all the more unexpected. Perfection can be eerie. The power of a ghost story lies in what is feared beneath the surface of the narrative, terrors glimpsed or imagined in the cracks, rather than what leaps out of the shadows.
Form is an issue. Novels are far more popular than short stories, but there are very few full-length ghost novels because of the difficulties of sustaining suspension of disbelief. Even in ghost writing's heyday, it was the short story – by Dickens, HP Lovecraft, Charlotte Riddell – that was the dominant form, while the longer classic of the genre,
, is only 43, 000 words. Readers need to be in a state of tension for the unfathomable to prey on fearful minds, yet this can be maintained by the writer for a limited time without risking nervous exhaustion.
Spooky Stories From The Wards: Why Do So Many Nurses Have One?
There is a fine balance between the psychological and the spectral. Ghost writing must involve a blurring between reality and madness or projection. So Sarah Waters's doctor in The Little Stranger slowly reveals himself to be an unreliable narrator; the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is either insane or accurate. The theory that the Governess in
May be a neurotic fantasist began when Edmund Wilson wrote his Freudian psychopathology interpretation in 1934, though I believe that James did not intend this. The dead Rebecca of Daphne du Maurier's novel skews the narrator's mind as powerfully as if she had appeared thumping round Manderley. The modern ghost writer inherits
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