The Weeping Woods of Hartsgrave
Adult Horror
Status: Complete
Query Letter
THE WEEPING WOODS OF HARTSGRAVE is a 105,000 word adult horror novel for fans of the soul-searching eeriness of TWIN PEAKS and the guilt-ridden family dynamics of Netflix's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE/BLY MANOR. This book would appeal to readers of the twist-filled mystery of Riley Sager's THE HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE, as well as the feminine dread of Liz Moore's THE GOD OF THE WOODS.
When New York private investigator Avery Turner learns of her twin sister Lexi's unexplained death across the country in the small town of Hartsgrave, Washington, her stable, isolated life is upended. The sisters couldn't have been more different in life and grew distant when Lexi moved away, but Avery must now confront her guilt about her abandonment of her troubled sister that may have led to her murder.
Alongside kind-hearted Sheriff Jack Gardner and his floppy-eared dog Cooper, Avery unravels Lexi's secret life: her extortionist drug dealer, her best friend's abusive husband, and her obsessed college professor. With Lexi's ghost and a strange white elk leading her into the Weeping Woods, and despite the cryptic Bird Lady's warnings, Avery descends into dark histories — of Hartsgrave and of her own past — to do right by the sister she failed, all while the murder suspects hunt her down.
Told in two points of view, THE WEEPING WOODS OF HARTSGRAVE follows Avery in the days following her sister's death, as well as Lexi in the days leading up to it, interspersed with memories of a childhood together in a tale of how grief lingers, memories haunt, and love redeems.
The First Page
The storm came on the wings of birds, and the people of Hartsgrave awoke to fire.
Sweat slithered slug-trails down their skin. The incendiary crackling grew all around them as they pulled free from their collective stupor. Dozens of them — wives and fathers and children and friends, dressed in pajamas or suits or schoolclothes — gathered in a congregation before one man. He whispered to them under his breath, some secret knowledge stolen from their grasp. Something they might have known, too, if they could only bear the flames. An unfinished dream, taunting them all with the sweetness, the mystery, of what could have been.
The birds screeched overhead, guiding the stormclouds over the trees. Lightning flashed, striking the wrinkled trunk of a Douglas fir, blackening the wood and setting the pines ablaze. Thunder crashed, drowning out the man’s whispers, as tree after tree erupted in fire, plume after plume rising like fields of golden flowers.
And two women sprinted into the wildfire, faces bright with panic, and screamed at everyone to run.
The people of Hartsgrave fled, begging for answers they would never know. What had led them into the woods? What had that man, that pale priest of forbidden truth, been trying to tell them? How did the fire start, and why did the storm not stop it, but spread it?
None who are alive may know.
What brought them into the Weeping Woods. What the pale priest had whispered to them. That invitation which has lived in the earth since the first dawn, warning, tempting.
There’s something, it whispers between the trees, even now, you should see.
