Historian Matt Robichaux is delighted when Hayden Lodge asks him to come to his home in the town of Bancroft to fact-check Lodge's latest novel. The invitation to spend time with the novelist in the town he owns is a prize awarded to very few.

Matt finds, however, that the town that owes its very existence to the most successful horror writer of all time may not be quite what it seems. The people Lodge has surrounded himself with are a peculiar group, to say the least—and those are just the ordinary inhabitants. Matt also encounters a seductive ghost lurking in a bookstore's dusty back rooms, a time-traveling apple orchard and its rambunctious keepers, a pair of randy woodworkers who may not actually exist, and a mysterious nature spirit haunting a quiet forest pool.

By the time Matt leaves Bancroft, he will have spent a week that was memorable, enjoyable, and totally impossible to explain.

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