The House Beneath The Snow

Ethan Mercer hasn't set foot in Blackwood, Vermont, in fifteen years. He left for good reason, and he's only come back now to bury his mother, sign some papers, and sell the isolated mountain house she left behind. A quick trip. In and out before the roads turn bad.

Then the biggest storm Blackwood has seen in decades rolls in off the mountain. The power dies. The roads vanish under three feet of snow. And alone in his mother's house for the first time in his life, Ethan finds a staircase that was never in any of her stories - hidden beneath the floorboards, leading somewhere she never once mentioned.

At the bottom is a locked room, and the room is papered floor to ceiling with photographs: decades of Blackwood residents who went into the woods, or into the storm, or simply out the front door, and were never seen again. Every photograph shares one impossible detail. Somewhere in the background of each one stands the same woman.

She hasn't aged a single day in a hundred years.

Snowed in with no way to call for help, Ethan turns to his mother's journals - the meticulous, obsessive research she spent thirty years compiling on a town that has been quietly losing people since the blizzard of 1954. Her final entry is four words, scrawled in a hand that isn't quite steady: Ethan, if Evelyn comes to the door, don't let her in.

That night, someone knocks.

With his childhood best friend Maya trapped on the far side of the storm and the property's caretaker refusing to say what he really knows about the family that has owned this house for generations, Ethan is left with an impossible choice: stay locked inside with a woman who says she knew his mother - and something underneath the house that has waited a very long time to be let out - or open the door.

The House Beneath the Snow is a gothic winter thriller about the weight of inherited secrets, the debts a family can never quite outrun, and the doors that are never, ever meant to be opened. Perfect for readers who love slow-burn supernatural suspense, isolated-house mysteries, and small towns with something buried just beneath the surface.