The House of the Second Face
A Novel of Ancestral Possession
Authored by The Masked Library Original
Archival Synopsis
Twenty-nine-year-old mirror restorer Elara Voss inherits Blackgrave House—a forbidding stone mansion on an iron-sea headland—under one terrifying condition: she must remain within its walls for twenty-eight consecutive nights and read aloud at midnight from the journals left by the previous inhabitant. But as the entries begin predicting her own unmade choices and the reflections in the tarnished Venetian glass begin smiling back independently, Elara discovers the twenty-eight nights were never a test of endurance. They were an ancestral transfer.
“The House of the Second Face is a sumptuous, terrifying masterwork of classical gothic fiction. Drawing upon the atmospheric majesty of Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier, it constructs an agonizing architecture of inevitability where mirrors do not merely reflect faces—they steal them.”
“The twenty-eight nights were never a test of endurance. They were a transfer.”
“Some bloodlines don’t fade. They replace.”
“I begin this record on the night I understand that the house has begun to remember me differently than I remember myself.”
“Midnight is exact. The house knows the hour.”
“She has seen me now. The second face is awake.”
Table of Contents
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