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A Recommended Book from CrimeReads and Alma
From Nebula Award winner Sam J. Miller comes a frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it.
Ronan Szepessy promised himself he’d never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City’s distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge.
Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom’s wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become—overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable.
Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real-state developers aren’t the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan’s hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.
Author: Sam J. Miller
Paperback Published May 2022 384 pages
Originally published in hardback 1 December 2020
"Like Clive Barker, Miller has a great talent for creating interesting characters and building up quiet dread.... Timely and interesting." -- San Francisco Chronicle
“A successful 'influencer' photographer returns to the gentrifying hometown that nearly broke him, and all hell breaks loose. The Blade Between is as addictive and brutal as it is smart and challenging. Miller unflinchingly confronts the sins of our past and present. The horrors here are rooted in there being no easy answers despite our individual and collective souls being ultimately at stake. Plus whales!” -- Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song
“[In] The Blade Between, the whole town of Hudson becomes a central character…. [A] sharp-edged novel… Stunning.” -- Locus