Tomorrow, ECW Press is due to publish the second novel from A.G.A. Wilmot (following 2018’s The Death Scene Artist): Withered — a “queer paranormal horror novel in the style of showrunner Mike Flannagan” (Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and so forth). To mark the release, the publisher has allowed CR to share the novel’s Prologue with our readers. First, check out the synopsis:

After the tragic death of their father and surviving a life-threatening eating disorder, 18-year-old Ellis moves with their mother to the small town of Black Stone, seeking a simpler life and some space to recover. But Black Stone feels off; it’s a disquieting place surrounded by towns with some of the highest death rates in the country. It doesn’t help that everyone says Ellis’s new house is haunted — everyone including Quinn, a local girl who has quickly captured Ellis’s attention. And Ellis has started to believe what people are saying: they see pulsing veins in their bedroom walls and specters in dark corners of the cellar. Together, Ellis and Quinn dig deep into Black Stone’s past and soon discover that their town, and Ellis’s house in particular, is the battleground in a decades-long spectral war, one that will claim their family — and the town — if it’s allowed to continue.

Withered is queer psychological horror, a compelling tale of heartache, loss, and revenge that tackles important issues of mental health in the way that only horror can: by delving deep into them, cracking them open, and exposing their gruesome entrails.

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PROLOGUE

Fifteen-year-old Tessa Sweet stood in front of the house at the end of Cherry Lane, ready to destroy it. In her left hand, she clutched a dirty orange canister of gasoline taken from the trunk of her father’s car; in her right, a handful of stained, grease-covered rags she’d found in the shed, draped over the handle of the lawn mower he’d promised to repair every summer for five years now. She moved her eyes up from the space between her feet; from the polished black shoes her mother had spit-shined for her that morning, before the funeral — scuffed now, caked in mud from where she’d traipsed through the ravine at the edge of town rather than come home for dinner like she should have. It was preferable to having to sit there with her parents and pretend, somehow, like saying nothing was better than crying; screaming; throwing crap against the wall while a bucket of fried chicken a neighbour had brought over — “Because you need to keep your strength up” — sat cooling in the centre of the kitchen table, uneaten.

Not destroy; kill. Destroy was what you did to an object or a thing.

Killing was for the living. And she would kill this house — their house — by any means necessary.

She looked up then, at the front of the house, windows dark, front door closed. The porch light flickered. “A short in the electrical,” her dad said the day they moved in.

“It’s time,” whispered a voice in her ear. A voice that shouldn’t be — that couldn’t be, if not for how he’d been taken from her.

It’s time, Tessa’s mother said earlier that morning, before they piled in the car to head to the cemetery.

It’s time, her father said when on the third day following it — the incident — she had still not gotten out of bed. You need to eat something; do something; say something.

“It’s time,” she echoed, and glanced to her left. To the boy her exact age and height, with an alabaster complexion — an image that she knew was, in fact, out of time. A betrayal of time, really. Because how could—

No. She shook her head.

“It’s time,” he said again, standing at her side.

She inhaled sharply. “I know.” The longer she stood there, the heavier the canister became.

“Tessa, you promised. I would do it myself if I could, but—”

“I know, it’s just—”

“You swore to me, you promised you’d do this.”

“They’re still in there!”

“They’ll get out. They’ll have time. But they’ll try to stop you if you warn them.”

“But what if—”

“They’re not safe here.” His voice swelled, tinged with venom. “You can’t protect them.”

Tears streaked her face. “Reece, I don’t… I don’t know about this.”

“You can’t save them! But I can. I can. I swear it.”

The porch light continued to flicker, quicker and quicker flashes, as if short circuiting.

“It’s hungry, Tessa. The house wants them, like it wanted me.”

“But we—”

Reece stepped forward; the flickering intensified — a startling arrhythmia, like a heart attack in Morse code. “Do it now! While you still can!”

Tessa shut her eyes, items still in hand, and marched up the front steps to the porch and opened the door, which her parents had left unlocked every night that week, every night since—

Inside, it was as warm and thick as it always seemed to be, no matter the season or how many fans her mother set up in each room. It was as humid and sticky as the night outside. She touched the wall with her shoulder as she made her way forward. Felt how hot-to-the-touch it was — like the throat of a living creature. In the kitchen, she unscrewed the cap from the gasoline canister, poured it out all over the floor. She placed the empty container down on the tile floor, accidentally kicking it over as she crossed to the counter. It made a hollow clanging noise; the house sighed then, a drawn-out sound like wood settling. She stopped and stared down the hallway, aghast at what she was seeing: the walls flexing outward as if an artery constricting. Reece, her brother, watched from the porch, staring at her through the open door.

“Don’t stop!” he shouted.

“Tessa? Is that you?”

She looked up to see her parents coming downstairs. Quickly, she went over to the oven and cranked every dial to its maximum. She threw several rags atop the slowly heating elements and dropped the last two to the ground, using her foot to thoroughly soak them in gasoline before picking them up and shoving them in the toaster, unsure if it would work but willing to try anything. Reece had told her: she had to try. She had to do what she could to save them. She had to kill the house.

“It’s a menace,” he’d said when he first appeared to her. She was walking home alone from the library the day after he’d died. She hadn’t believed what she was seeing, not at first, but he’d known everything about her. Everything there was to know, from their earliest days together up until their very last. “It’s a threat. It wants to devour you whole. The house… our house… it’s alive, Tessa. You know this. You’ve heard it — you’ve heard them. It’s alive, and it’s dangerous.”

You’re dangerous, she thought then, watching as the walls heaved; breathed. And you won’t take any more of us.

She’d known something was wrong with their house from the very beginning. The way people in town talked about it, the whispers-like-song they’d both heard at night — her and Reece — inexplicable hushed tones as if the air itself were attempting to communicate. It’s why Reece had followed her to the clearing that night, the one deep in the woods behind their house, where they’d met up with her friends and performed the seance from the book that Eleanor had stolen from her mother’s collection.

She’d known there was something more to it, to their house, and now she knew what. It had taken her brother from them,and it would take the rest of them, too, unless she put a stop to it.

“I see you!” she cried, terrified at the sight of the undulating walls. Her heart was beating in time with what looked like ridges, a harp of veins suddenly pushing up through the drywall, like creases in wallpaper, too many to count. They pulsed then, as if in tandem with her insides, her fears. “I see you for what you are.”

Her father came up from behind her then and wrapped his arms all the way around her torso, pulled her out of the kitchen and into the hallway as she kicked and screamed and threw her head side to side in a panic.

Her mother came over to them, still dressed in her nightgown. “Oh my god,” she said, staring at the kitchen floor awash ingasoline. She ran over to the stove and started switching dials off, used an oven mitt from a nearby drawer to sweep the smok- ing rags into the sink.

“Stop!” Tessa screamed as her mother unplugged the toaster. “I need to save us!” She wrestled free of her father’s grip and darted over to her mother. Grabbed the toaster and threw it and the rags to the ground, but what little flames there’d been were already extinguished.

Her parents took hold of her and hugged her tight, bringing her to her knees — all their knees — coughing and crying amid the gasoline.

“I need to do it.” Tessa turned her head, buried it in her mother’s chest and started to weep. “He told me to. He told me….”

And they held her, and cried, and the house shook just enough for Tessa to feel it. She watched, pleadingly, over their shoulders and down the hall, as Reece, her brother, her twin, turned from the door, from the house, and vanished into the night.

Excerpted in part from Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot.
Copyright © by A.G.A. Wilmot, 2024. Published by ECW Press Ltd.

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A.G.A. Wilmot’s Withered is published by ECW Press on April 16th, in Canada, the US, and the UK.

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