St. Edah’s, a house without exit: Lethe and Petunia are mortal prisoners, servants to immortal creatures who unzip from their skin each night and party as skeletons.
Lethe has no memory of how she came to be trapped in this nightmare, only that despite the tenderness she feels for Petunia, she must escape. Together, they traverse the infinite house, searching for passage while finding evidence of their former lives—lives that are not what they believed them to be.
Lethe must decide: join the immortals in their revelry or escape St. Edah’s once and for all.
Praise for From These Dark Abodes
Manusos’s poetic and emotional writing brings poignancy to this story of people who have lost everything, including the knowledge of what they lost. The result is twisty, complex, and rewarding speculative fiction.
Publishers Weekly Review
FROM THESE DARK ABODES is an intricately crafted labyrinth with hidden spaces in between that weaves together decadent body horror, complex relationships—intimate like hugging bones, exposed like peeled back skin—told through prose with an intoxicating atmospheric pull, crawling with sensory details.
Ai Jiang, Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker Award nominated author of LINGHUN and I AM AI
FROM THESE DARK ABODES clawed my heart open and brought the sinew and sharp needle to sew it closed again. From Lethe’s fathomless longing to Petunia’s claustrophobic, crushed-down postpartum existence, this novella felt terribly human–filled with all the ways we hurt and help each other.
Aimee Ogden, author of Nebula Award Finalist SUN-DAUGHTERS, SEA-DAUGHTERS
Both mysterious and intimate, From These Dark Abodes will enthrall you and make you fall in love with all the charming imperfections of humanity.
Eugenia Triantafyllou, author of Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge
From These Dark Abodes is a wonderfully dark page-turner overflowing with fairytale-like dread. Much like the revelers of St. Edah’s who strip themselves of flesh to unsheathe their gilded bones, this novella continually changes shape until it reveals its vulnerable center in its final pages. A tender triumph about grief, memory, and elusive self-acceptance, as well as a masterful myth-mystery you’ll want to reread once you reach the end.
Thomas Ha, Nebula, Locus, and Shirley Jackson-Nominated Author
“Dreamy and evocative, From These Dark Abodes is a novella suffused with longing that explores the meaning of life through the specter of death.”
A.C. Wise, author of The Ghost Sequences
