An “intelligent, melancholy, and terrifying” ghost story set in a picture-perfect Vermont town (Paul G. Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World).

In 1993, teenage Claire and her twin brother, Sam, sneak out to Farmington’s old textile factory, where they’ve heard the high school kids go to party. When Sam falls into a basement window and injures himself, Claire runs for help, thinking she’s left Sam alone. But something horrible is inside the otherwise empty factory with him . . .

Fifteen years later, Claire is working as Farmington’s librarian, secretly wrestling with her guilt after her brother’s death. She leads a quiet, lonely life—until Sam begins visiting her.

Meanwhile, Justin, an ambitious business developer, has come to town to transform the abandoned factory into a new boutique retail location. But a painful, violent past lies behind the building’s walls that, for everyone’s sake, might be better left undisturbed . . .

“A lyrical, haunting, and unsettling story . . . [crafted] out of the skeletons and whispers of a small town with a decidedly tragic past.” —Richard Thomas, author of Disintegration

“Recalls the golden era of 1970s and 1980s horror fiction, but burnished with an entirely contemporary voice, crafted with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for language. Reminiscent of the early work of Rosemary Campbell and Charles L. Grant, simultaneously chilling and poignant, this novel and its inhabitants hauntedme long after I had uneasily put it down.” —Michael Rowe, author of Enter, Night

Exigencies