THE SHADOW MAN: A Novel

In the tradition of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic, The Shadow Man is a haunting literary horror novel that explores the terrible price of survival and the courage required to break a curse that has claimed generations of women.

Twenty-nine-year-old Nia Carter has always known something was wrong with her family. The women die young always before their thirtieth birthday, always under mysterious circumstances. When her grandmother Ruth dies at the improbable age of ninety-two, Nia inherits more than just a decaying Victorian house in rural Georgia. She inherits a legacy of terror that stretches back two hundred years.

The house breathes. Shadows move independently. And in the corner of every room, something watches and waits. As Nia explores her inheritance, she discovers her grandmother's hidden journals and uncovers the horrifying truth: every firstborn daughter in the Carter bloodline belongs to a supernatural entity known only as the Shadow Man. He comes for them before they turn thirty. He has never failed to claim what he believes is his.

The curse began in 1823, when Nia's enslaved ancestor desperate to protect her daughter from the brutality of plantation life called upon an ancient darkness to exact revenge on their oppressors. The Shadow Man answered. He killed the slavemasters and burned the plantation to ash. But his help came with a price: one daughter from every generation, forever. What began as an act of desperate protection became an eternal sentence of supernatural bondage.

With only days remaining until her thirtieth birthday, Nia must confront not only the Shadow Man but also the devastating choices her grandmother made to survive. Ruth lived decades beyond her expiration date but only by feeding other women to the entity that should have claimed her. The house holds their bones. The journals catalog their names. And the Shadow Man grows stronger with every sacrifice.