The White Rot Beneath the Snow

Something is wrong with the light on the Coldbrook road.

When a stranger who gives no name walks up the Glim family's lane one October evening, he offers Les Glim something cheap, destructive, and impossible to refuse: a door out of thirty years of debt, dying-town poverty, and the particular exhaustion of a family that has always had to survive entirely on its own. What it actually opens is worse than anything the family bargained for.

Over the following two years, addiction spreads through three generations sharing one patch of frozen Alberta prairie - and something else spreads with it, patient and unhurried, in the walls, in the ground beneath the root cellar, in the fierce loyalty that once held the Glims together and now seals every door through which help might have reached them.

The White Rot Beneath the Snow is a novel of body horror, cosmic dread, and unbearable tenderness - slow-burn rural gothic in the spirit of Shirley Jackson's dread and Stephen King's rot at the heart of small places, told through the eyes of the one boy still trying to hold what's left of his family together.

Some ground has always had things waiting under it. That was never really the horror.