Soft Light, Sharp Teeth
ROWAN TAYLOR BOOKS
Welcome to the quiet horror of Rowan Taylor — where memories linger, love unravels, and the line between presence and absence is never quite clear. These are stories that don’t scream — they whisper, weep, and wait in the silence.Here, hauntings are intimate. Familiar faces become unfamiliar. Rooms remember. And some doors never close.Rowan Taylor writes unsettling fiction that blends psychological dread with the supernatural, exploring what it means to forget—and to be forgotten. She is also known as Tracy Fobes, author of eight award-winning paranormal romances published by Simon & Schuster and Leisure LoveSpell. Fobes has also independently published numerous romantic suspense stories, including Hard Charger and Billionaire’s Hidden Heart.As Fobes, she wrote of witches, grimalkins, haunted seas, and dangerous love. As Rowan, she steps fully into the dark.She lives near Philadelphia, owns too many books and too few flashlights, and believes the scariest monsters are the ones who know your name.
True death comes with forgetting
The Memory Keeper
Mara came to catalogue a house. Instead, it began cataloguing her.When archivist Mara accepts a contract to catalog the crumbling Dumont estate, she expects solitude and structure. What she finds instead is a house saturated with secrets—and something that refuses to stay buried. The deeper she digs into the disappearance of Isabelle Dumont, a silenced woman erased from the family’s legacy, the more Mara feels herself unraveling. Her memories bend. Her reflection shifts. And someone—something—is watching her from behind the walls.The presence haunting the estate isn’t just a ghost. It’s a predator—methodical, controlling, and deeply practiced in the art of possession. It doesn’t just want Mara’s body. It wants her obedience, her memory, and her silence.As the past closes in, Mara must unearth Isabelle’s truth before her own is overwritten. But the deeper she goes, the more she realizes: this haunting doesn’t want to be uncovered. It wants to be obeyed.The Memory Keeper is a gothic psychological horror about coercion, haunting, and the violence of being rewritten—memory by memory.
A voyage into ancient hunger
CROATOAN
He hides aboard to save one man. The sea demands the rest.Kit Cabot stows away on the clipper Apollyon for one reason: to save his uncle, Captain John Cabot. Ever since John carried a strange red pearl out of a sea cave, something in him isn’t right—his eyes gleam with a red-black swirl, his words hit like a physical blow, and the name he murmurs, Croatoan, makes hardened sailors go quiet.As the crew whispers mutiny and the lash sings on deck, Kit and his few allies hunt the pearl’s origins, only to learn it isn’t a jewel at all but a window—an invitation—and something on the other side has noticed them. Storms close in; the coast grows treacherous; and John’s humanity thins to a terrible calm.To save his uncle—maybe even his soul—Kit must decide how far he’ll go, and what he’ll become, in a battle where obedience means doom and defiance is the only prayer left.Croatoan is a fast-paced nautical horror about loyalty, corruption, and the price of holding onto someone who’s already slipping away. In a sea of forgettable tales, this one pulls you under — and doesn’t let you surface.
Some friendships refuse to stay buried
DEAD FRIENDS FOREVER
The bayou remembers.
It holds on to every body it’s swallowed, every sin it’s hidden, every secret whispered into its black water.Lily swore she’d never return—not after Amelia vanished, and the mournful angel statue was set in the garden so that Amelia would never be forgotten. But when her brother’s body is found in the swamp, Lily feels the old current pulling her back. The house is just as she left it: sagging under the weight of silence, steeped in the smell of damp earth. And Aunt Clara is still tucking away letters, photographs, and trinkets in drawers and boxes, as if hiding the past will keep it from finding them.It starts with small things. A heart-shaped locket engraved MINE, appearing where it doesn’t belong. Polaroids whose flash cuts through more than darkness. Then Lily sees her—Amelia, smiling the way she used to—except the girl in front of her is not the cousin she lost.Every night, Amelia’s angel moves. One day it’s in the garden where it has stood for twenty years, the next in the cemetery, then ankle-deep in the swamp. Lily can’t tell if it’s coming for her, or if she’s already caught inside its gaze. And in the bayou, the dead don’t rest. They wait for you to remember them—and to finish what you started.Dead Friends Forever is a slow-burn Southern Gothic horror about the weight of memory, the pull of guilt, and the dangerous comfort of letting the dead back in.
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