Sign-In
Cart
Nine Feet of Father
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 22 2026
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A man buried as gentle.
A son who remembers something else.
A doorframe that kept the truth.
The funeral home ran out of chairs an hour before the service. Sixty mourners came to grieve Arthur Hale, a quiet man everyone praised as kind, humble, and gentle - the kind of man who never took up more room than he needed.
But when Marcus Hale returns to his childhood home, he finds a record carved into the family doorframe that makes every kind word feel wrong.
The marks begin impossibly high.
Nine feet.
Then they descend.
Year after year. Generation after generation. Until the final mark sits eleven inches off the floor, dated nine days before his father's heart stopped.
As Marcus searches for answers, his mother begins telling the truth the Hale family spent decades sanding down, hiding away, and burying: a grandfather who disappeared into a casket too small for a man, a cellar board cut from an older house, and a family inheritance that does not make men larger.
It measures what fear, silence, and love have taken from them.
Marcus has his father's hands. People have told him so his whole life.
Now he has a daughter of his own - and a choice his father never gave him.
Keep the family record hidden.
Or hand her the pencil.
Nine Feet of Father is a Southern Gothic horror novel about inheritance, silence, family myth, and the terrifying cost of making yourself small enough to survive.
Some legacies shrink with every generation.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback