What if you could be haunted by another person's nightmares?
Anxious about her approaching wedding and desperate to clear her mind, Lindsey Holland decides to leave her native Texas and spend the summer working for friends who manage a Christian coffee house in Oregon. Staying at the seaside mansion of Mrs. Katherine Cutler, a reclusive widow, Lindsey faces recurring nightmares of a woman imprisoned in a lighthouse and disturbing encounters with spectral beings that haunt the mansion's dark chambers and twisting corridors. At first, she dismisses the experiences as pre-wedding jitters, but, as the intensity grows, she fears that she may be in the grip of supernatural forces beyond her understanding or, perhaps even more terrifying, descending into madness. A young married couple, a jealous fiancé, an aspiring filmmaker, and a troubled teen who claims to have psychic powers all join her on a harrowing journey through the twisting mazes of the heart to confront the dark secret that has held Mrs. Cutler prisoner for over sixty years.
Author’s Comments: The inspiration for this project came from a number of sources. When I had trouble selling my young adult science fiction projects, I considered switching to horror. Dean Koontz, one of my favorite authors, made the switch from science fiction to suspense/horror early in his career, and it has worked very well for him. I got the inspiration for this novel when I visited the area around Portland, Oregon, and Astoria, Washington, for my brother’s wedding. The rocky coasts with their rainforests, caves, and lighthouses and the tourist towns (and UFO and Bigfoot legends) made the Pacific Northwest the perfect place for the kind of novel I’d wanted to write. I knew the Christian fiction market was mainly female, so I wanted to write this one with a female main character. As college students, I and many of the friends I’d met at the Baptist Student Union had served as summer missionaries. I had spent ten weeks living with strangers in Washington D.C. and Hawaii, and those experiences had stayed with me. I added other elements of the character’s personal drama as I went along.
