The Grafting Season at Mercy House
A Novel

About this book:

Maeve Ashford needs the money badly enough to ignore the red flags: a sealed contract, a clause claiming ownership of the patient's discarded skin, and a salary that buys eight weeks of silence at a marsh-locked estate where the spring fog hides more than the tide. At Mercy House, the Mercer family doesn't merely fall ill—they molt. Every April, their outer skin dies, dries, and sloughs off in brittle sheets, revealing raw, pink new flesh beneath. Maeve's job is to manage the shedding, burn the castoffs, and ask no questions about why the housekeeper's face is stretched tight as drumskin, or why the maids scrub their hands until the knuckles bleed.

But the longer she stays, the more the house's rhythms turn predatory. The bell system that summons her to the third floor. The photographs lining the stairwell—generations of nurses who share the same cheekbones, the same cleft chins, the same dark hair pinned under starched caps. The journal she isn't supposed to find, written in a hand that matches her own. And the terrible, seductive logic of Alistair Mercer, who calls the annual agony "the harvest" and watches her with eyes that have already decided what she will become.

Gothic, visceral, and wound tight as a tourniquet, *The Grafting Season at Mercy House* is a fever dream of body horror and quiet dread—where care is a currency, skin is a garment to be tailored, and the line between nurse and successor is measured in flakes on the floorboards.