The Off-Season Lease

About this book:

June Clark needs silence to finish her manuscript. She finds it in a cedar cabin on Blackwood Lake—two bedrooms, a stone hearth, and a rent of $250 a month, utilities included. The catch is a three-page lease written in cold, precise ink: maintain the fire, secure the latches at sunset, never answer voices from the water, and whatever you do, do not touch the padlocked pantry. The previous tenants signed in 1984 and 2002. Neither stayed until spring.

By the time June realizes the ledger on the dining table writes back, the gravel road has iced over and the lake has gone black as ink. The woodstove demands a specific fuel. The shadows on the treeline have footsteps. And the landlord, M. Vance, isn't collecting rent—he’s collecting something far older, binding, and due on the first thaw.

Atmospheric, claustrophobic, and steadily tightening like a wire around a wrist, *The Off-Season Lease* is a folk horror novel about the fine print nobody reads, the warmth that lures you in, and the price of a winter’s solitude when the dark decides to foreclose.