This is the story of Starling House.
It started as a dream, like most houses do. I still lived in Kentucky at the time, but I was getting ready to leave: scrolling real estate sites, boxing up old baby clothes, trying to brainwash our friends into coming with us. I’d left home before—again and again, actually—so the dream I had was a familiar one: that I found a way to stay.
Dreams don’t grow into houses (or books) without the time, talent, labor, love, patience, and sheer will of dozens of people. The unfair thing is that, if they do their work well, it’s mostly invisible by the time guests arrive.
I am grateful to my agent, Kate McKean, who saw the blueprints for this book and not only didn’t burn them, but found the perfect place to start building. To my editor, Miriam Weinberg, who walked through during construction and wondered aloud if we really needed four bedrooms (we did not). To Dr. Rose Buckelew, for her inspection of an early draft, and Dr. Natalie Aviles, for connecting us. To the entire production team—Terry McGarry, Dakota Griffin, Rafal Gibek, Steven Bucsok, Lauren Hougen, and Sam Dauer—who patched all the holes and asked, politely, if I meant to put two kitchen sinks right next to each other. To Isa Caban, Sarah Reidy, and Giselle Gonzalez, the marketing and publicity divinities who are the only reason any of you are here. To the cover artist, Micaela Alcaino, and designer, Peter Lutjen, who made this place something worth seeing, and to the legendary Rovina Cai, who graciously hung her work on the walls. And extra thanks to Tessa Villanueva, editorial assistant, without whom I wouldn’t even know who to thank.
I am grateful, too, for my friends, even though sometimes they asked how the book was coming—Taye and Camille, Sarah and Alli, Corrie and José—and for their beautiful babies, who never did. To the Kentucky writers who still speak to me even though I moved outside the Ale-8 delivery region: Gwenda, Christopher, Lee, Olivia, Sam, Ashley, Z, Alex, Caroline, and Ellie. And to the bunker, which sounds like a doomsday cult but is actually a Discord server.
And I could never have written this book—or any book, really—without my family. My dad, who gave me my grandfather’s toolbox when I was sixteen and took me to see Prine when I was seventeen, and my mom, who read every version of “Beauty and the Beast” with me. I know I moved away from home, but I see you both every day in the mirror.
My brothers, who never needed me half as much as I need them. Finn, who would stand bravely before the beasts, and Felix, who would befriend them.
And Nick, who is my house and hearth, my foundation and my four walls. I haven’t been homesick since the day we met, my love.
Footnotes
1. According to Lyle Reynolds, the Gravely Power meter man from 1987–2017, Starling House was never connected to the electric grid or the municipal water system. The telephone company sued for the right to place poles on Starling land in 1947, but the project was abandoned after a series of ugly accidents that left three employees hospitalized.
2. This is false. Between 2006 and 2009, Opal used the staff printer at the public library to print several pieces of short fiction. In ’08, she received a personal rejection from a literary magazine which said that, regrettably, they did not publish fantasy, horror, or “whatever this is supposed to be.”
3. Willy Floyd, 13, went missing on April 13, 1989; the old mine shaft was boarded up four years before Opal was born. Perhaps she merely dreamed of it, and mistook the dream for a memory.
4. Lynn and Oscar Starling died sometime in October of 2007. The coroner was not able to determine a more precise date of death; his autopsy report cites the unfortunate delay, and the “goddamned state of them.”
5. Satellite images of the property are notoriously unreliable. If you were to type the address into your phone you would see nothing but slate rooftops and blurry, recalcitrant green, which would never quite come into focus.
6. Odessa and Madge Starling, who lived in the house between 1971 and 1989, were last seen alive behind the old middle school. The school janitor told the sheriff they were chasing something. A dog, he originally stated, but in a later deposition he claimed it was Willy and his friends. Neither Willy nor the Starlings were ever seen again, although there have been reports of whimpering sounds echoing from the mouth of the old mine shaft.
7. Opal is referring to John Prine’s 1971 song “Paradise,” recorded on his debut album. Gravely Power took considerable offense to the line “Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking / Old Gravely’s coal train has hauled it away,” resulting in several lawsuits and a brochure titled “Facts vs. Prine.” “Ironically,” the brochure begins, “we probably helped supply the energy to make that recording that so unfairly maligns us.”
8. Despite exhaustive research, including consultations with art historians and curators, it has proven impossible to determine the original painters of these portraits. There are no records of commissions, no recognizable styles, no identifiable pigments. It is as if the paintings simply manifested, one by one, on the walls of Starling House.
9. None of the persons mentioned were born with the name Starling, but all of them were buried with it. Though they were not related by blood, they all shared a tendency to keep excellent records, to which the present Warden of Starling House has been generous enough to grant me access.
10. In addition to its being several degrees cooler than the surrounding waters, there is a countywide advisory against swimming in the Mud River. The advisory cites the presence of mercury and arsenic, but there are also a statistically unlikely number of drownings reported each year. One survivor swore he felt a hand around his ankle, pulling him down; he said the fingers were small and fragile, like a little girl’s.
11. The original Gravely Manor sat very near the site of the power plant. It was abandoned following the death of the youngest Gravely brother in 1886 and caught fire shortly afterward. No member of the Gravely family has lived in Eden since, and few of them visit for more than a day or two.
12. The burial was, by all accounts, a frustrating event. The operator worried that the substrate was porous and friable, causing a series of small landslides that constantly refilled the grave. The reporters complained about the wait, and the weather. The fog wasn’t good for their cameras.
13. This should not be mistaken for a demographic accident. Kentucky—the thirteenth star on the Confederate flag, the birthplace of both Davis and Lincoln, and the home to over two hundred thousand enslaved men, women, and children—went unmentioned in the Emancipation Proclamation, and was later excluded from Reconstruction. Many freedmen fled, and Kentucky buried their tracks quite efficiently. Their names were forgotten and their homes were torn down; their graveyards were left untended, swallowed up by poison ivy and ironweed, until eventually they were paved over for used car lots or strip malls. Their memories are preserved only by their kin, in the stories told by those who stayed, and those who left.