House of Leaves meets We Have Always Lived in the Castle in this claustrophobic horror tale about a woman who learns that every angle in a house can be a mouth. Grayhaven, Maine—October 3rd, 1998: Audio archivist Mara Ellison returns to her late grandmother's crumbling boardinghouse, The Wetherby, to empty rooms, settle debts, and ignore the gossip that something in the walls took Gran before winter could. The place is wrong in quiet ways: copper triangles nailed into baseboards, chalk lines sealing corners, a locked pantry fitted with mirrors, and an 8mm reel labeled KEEP DOOR SHUT. When Mara plays it, the film shows empty rooms inside The Wetherby that are not empty at all. Cold breath clouds the corners first, then faces emerge from the angles like frostwork, whispering her name in a voice that sounds like her mother's.
Deputy Ian McCabe, tired and cautious, blames mold bloom and a cracked oil line for the headaches and lapses Mara won't confess to. But Mrs. Toomey, an elderly tenant who never left, tightens her rosary and insists the house is a trap for old winter, an intelligence that pools where walls meet. The more Mara cleans, the colder the rooms get; pry away one plastered-over nook and another voice answers from a closet that shouldn't exist. A visiting researcher from a Boston lab arrives with instruments to measure negative heat, promising a rational cure if she helps him open every sealed angle in the home.
Mara must decide whether to trust him, trust the dead who tug at her sleeve, or trust the soundscapes she records at 3:11 a.m.—a chorus of knocks, distant ship bells, and something counting down in the pantry. To save the last remaining tenant—and herself—she'll have to unmake The Wetherby room by room, binding the corners with wire and salt, even if it means giving the winter in the walls exactly what it's been waiting for: a way in.
If you favor the quiet dread of Michael Wehunt's Greener Pastures or the cosmic hush of Laird Barron's The Croning, this shares the vibe, but the human arc never quite catches and the repeated room-clearing sequences wore thin for me.
I wanted to feel trapped with Mara, but I felt stranded near her instead.
She records and records, yet her interior pulse stays faint. I kept asking why she keeps pushing past the chalked corners when the book gives her so little beyond duty and denial. The voice that sounds like her mother should crack her open; it barely scuffs the surface.
The deputy is a shrug in a uniform, tired in a way that becomes an excuse for not evolving. The researcher arrives like a thesis statement with legs, all instruments and no person.
Conversations slip into loops. "It's colder." "It's nothing." Repeat. The house is the loudest character, and that would be fine if the humans didn't feel like placeholders for fear.
By the time the mirrors and wire come back around, I was numb. The concept chills, but the people never thaw.
The themes hum beneath the frost. This isn't just a haunted house, it's a meditation on inheritance and consent, on what we let into our homes and what we lock out, on how grief echoes until "every angle can be a mouth."
Mara's choices among science, memory, and the dead stage a quiet debate about authority. The salt lines read like boundaries reclaimed, and the counting in the pantry asks who gets to measure a life when a family story freezes in place.
By treating winter as an intelligence that pools in corners, the book builds rules that feel ancient yet scientific; wire and salt as binding, mirrors as ward, negative heat as threat, all threaded through The Wetherby like cold plumbing.
Strong mood, uneven motion.
If you like atmosphere over momentum, this will work; I just wanted the investigation to move with fewer repetitions of the same room-clearing beats.
The structure fits the sickness in the house. Chapters tighten as the rooms cool, and the archival elements feel integral rather than gimmicky.
The book's best trick: letting the angles of sentences mirror the angles that frighten Mara, so that even exposition feels slanted and unsafe. The recurring 3:11 a.m. soundscapes and the 8mm interludes are paced with care, though a few late whisper-quote exchanges blur together. Overall, a confident, well-cut design for an off-kilter tale.
