Everybody knows Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”—but who was she really? In this haunting and evocative novel, Christopher Conlon (“one of the preeminent names in contemporary literary horror”—Booklist) imagines a life for one of literature’s most renowned characters. Hers is a chronicle even more thrilling, doom-haunted, and tragic than Poe himself could have conceived.
A woman finds herself alone in a pitch-black room without doors or windows, completely cut off from human contact…A man wakes one morning certain that today is the day he must commit and unspeakable atrocity…A gifted jazz musician runs from her past—but even she has no idea how lethal that past really is.
Mona Straw has it all—beautiful daughter, caring husband, lovely home, fulfilling job as a middle-school teacher. But one day a new man enters Mona’s life and turns it upside-down, their passionate affair tilting her mind to the edge of madness—and murder.
Her lover’s name is Connor. He’s got blonde hair, green eyes…and he’s eleven years old.