Some hungers wear kind faces. Some roses bloom where nothing should grow.
Michael Denny has spent forty-five years vanishing?drifting from town to town with nothing but a guitar, a journal, and a radio in his head that picks up other people's emotions like bad static. When a Craigslist ad leads him to a catering family in drought-stricken Highland, California, he tells himself it's just one job. Cash work. Then he'll keep moving.
The Thorens house looks ordinary. The roses lining the walk do not. Lush, blood-red, and smelling of sweetness gone to rot, they turn their faces toward him as he passes. Inside, Helena's warm smile, Jake's hearty laugh, Cupcake's fizzing energy, and Mother Ruth's grandmotherly comfort feel like everything Denny has spent his life avoiding. But the radio won't stay quiet. At wakes and celebrations, he begins to see the threads?violet grief, gold memory, wine-dark loss?rising from the guests and vanishing into the smiling family.
Beneath the house lies something older than kindness: a vast, patient hunger that has fed for centuries on the living while keeping its victims screaming and aware. When the family sets its sights on the one person Denny has ever let close, the vanishing man stops running. He learns to push back. He learns to send as well as receive. And he discovers that the only weapon strong enough to destroy a thing that eats emotion... is to give it more than it can ever swallow.
At the family's five-hundred-year feast, with hundreds of guests laughing while they are slowly hollowed, Denny will face the Eternal Hon itself.
Some hungers wear kind faces. Some roses bloom in drought country. And some vanishing men finally decide to stand still.
A slow-burn supernatural horror novel of emotional vampirism, weird fiction, and the terrible power of being truly seen.
