The Loveliest Dead

Book excerpt: In this “shocker from [a] horror maestro,” a grieving family’s inheritance stirs the past and brings out the dead (Publishers Weekly). After the sudden death of their youngest child, Josh, Jenna and David Kellar need a fresh and healing new start. When Jenna is bequeathed her estranged father’s home in the coastal town of Eureka, California, it’s the opportunity the Kellars, their son Miles, and Jenna’s elderly mother have been looking for. And the last thing they expected. The house has been waiting for them, and so have those who still walk there in the dark. There are the children seen playing in the backyard—at once innocent and terrifying; the noises and music that rattle the walls; the man who appears in Miles’s bedroom at night, watching over him with an unhealthy obsession. But when Jenna sees Josh, she fears that she’s either losing her mind or someone is playing a very sick game. For a local psychic, it’s neither—it’s a warning. For the Kellars, the past isn’t dead. In fact, it’s just starting to come alive. A Bram Stoker Award finalist for Live Girls, “Garton shows a sure hand in ... mixing The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door” (Bookgasm). A winner of the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award, Garton is in the company of such recipients as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and Richard Matheson.