Good Bones

By: Brian E. Niskala

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Some houses don't just remember what happened inside them. They keep it.

Dana Voss makes a living pulling pieces out of houses nobody else will touch — the beam a man used to mark six years of his family's captivity, the wall where a mother tore her own home apart trying to get something out. She wraps what she finds. She delivers it. She doesn't ask where it goes.

She should have asked.

The pieces aren't being disposed of. They're being built into something — a structure assembled from a century and a half of extracted grief, growing patient and hungry inside a warehouse Dana has never been allowed to enter. Her mysterious client calls it a door. He says it will bring his daughter back.

He's lying. Or he's forgotten the truth so completely that it's become one.

As Dana starts pulling at the threads of who — or what — she's actually been working for, she uncovers a hundred and eighty years of buried history, a warning her own grandfather died trying to protect her from, and a choice no amount of money can undo: finish the door, or become the first person in that structure's entire patient existence to say no.

Good Bones is a horror novel about the wounds we're willing to profit from, the grief that never stops accumulating interest, and what it actually costs to tear something down instead of feeding it one more time.