G. V. Anderson

Following the death of her mother, Fiona buys a new house in order to start a new chapter of her life, one with fewer reminders of painful memories. Unbeknownst to Fiona, this house has a melancholy history, and slightly more ghosts than she anticipated. In learning to live with her unexpected companions and their losses, Fiona might find a way to make peace with her own. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A Tor.com Original

Hearts in the Hard Ground

aleksandra

2.5/5

Short, sapphic and spooky.


  
    "That’s another thing about living alone: there’s only a house to comfort you. The creak of wood contracting in the cold, the bang of old pipes in the wall, the secret sounds you only hear when you’re awake in the early hours, soggy with grief."
  


Not to mention the utterly gorgeous cover. It was really short, so I didn't get attached to the characters, hence the low rating.

i liked where this was going, but the narrative style is very much not for me. whoever popularized the no quotation marks for dialogue movement needs to die.

Gavin

Managed to unnerve me despite the extreme domesticity.

The big problem with stories about haunted houses is why anyone would ever stay in them after the first bad night. The stories require a stupefied lack of agency to get through their second acts. So too here, but it isn't very irksome. The other big problem is the lack of empirical spirit from the protagonists - can we finish philosophy of mind by enlisting the ghosts? There's a little bit of that here, but mostly just the old emotional haunting.

Hearts in the Hard Ground A Tor.com Original

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