From the award-winning author of Hide Me Among the Graves, Last Call, Declare, and Three Days to Never,
a phantasmagoric, thrilling, mind-bending tale of speculative fiction
in which one man must uncover occult secrets of 1920s Hollywood to save
his family.
In the wake of their Aunt Amity’s suicide, Scott and
Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in
the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and
reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his
sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline’s return to the
childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go
back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister
away from this haunted “House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills” that is a
conduit for the supernatural.
Decorated by bits salvaged from old
hotels and movie sets, Caveat hides a dark family secret that stretches
back to the golden days of Rudolph Valentino and the silent film stars.
A collection of hypnotic eight-limbed abstract images inked on paper
allows the Maddens to briefly fragment and flatten time—to transport
themselves into the past and future in visions that are both puzzling
and terrifying. Though their cousins know little about these ancient
“spiders” which provoke unpredictable temporal dislocations, Ariel and
Claimayne have been using for years—an addiction that has brought
Claimayne to the brink of selfish destruction.
As Madeline falls
more completely under Caveat’s spell, Scott discovers that to protect
her, he must use the perilous spiders himself. But will he unravel the
mystery of the Madden family’s past and finally free them. . . or be
pulled deeper into their deadly web?