She Waits Where Shadows Gather: A Novel

He came back from the dead, but he didn't come alone.

Avery and Carlos Tam are hardened skeptics who don’t believe in the paranormal. Carlos, the face of a hit reality show exposing paranormal fraudsters and debunking myths, thinks he’s seen it all—and none of it is real. Their newest adventure takes them to the Philippines and Carlos’s ancestral home. Though the family is loath to admit that anything unusual has ever happened in the house, their neighbors believe in spirits and the supernatural—they whisper about the home’s sinister history, and the housekeeper refuses to stay in the house alone but won’t say why. And while the house is dark and all the mirrors are covered for reasons Avery can’t get anyone to tell her, it seems like a regular creaky old house.

But when a devastating car crash leaves Carlos bedridden, he’s not only trapped in the house, he’s also held hostage in his own body. Avery, now both caretaker and prisoner, watches helplessly as their once-solid marriage crumbles under the weight of secrets and an unspeakable evil. The life she envisioned for herself—finally finding a place to call home, doting on a house full of children, and spending happy years with Carlos—seem to fall further out of her reach.

The house seems to feed on their fear, and as Carlos lies immobile, trapped in a silent scream of rage and terror, something in the house begins to listen. And worse—it answers. This entity understands Carlos’s darkest thoughts, his most primal fears. It speaks to him in ways Avery never could, offering a twisted salvation that comes at an unthinkable price. Can Avery and Carlos escape this supernatural nightmare? Or will the secrets inside the house consume them?