THE STORY OF A PECULIAR HAUNTED HOUSE: There was a country song about people who beat you down, do you wrong, steal, cheat and lie. They ain't no good and there ain't no reason why. And so it is with places. Some are good and some aren't, and there's no reason why. Even thin places in the spirit wall have nothing to do with whether a place is itself good or not. There was nothing really wrong with Point of Ospreys, except for the weak spot in the spirit wall. Outside that circle of green, it was fine. There was nothing remarkable about the beach and meadows across the bay from Point of Ospreys, either. This land had no significant ancient history-no history at all, except the Milltawnuk Indians had lived there. Yet, in truth, there had been no place on the planet that was so completely in harmony with the universe as was the southern tip of the beach, where it curved around to the east. Not since the Garden of Eden. Darke House is the story of this extraordinary place-how a haunted house came to be in the middle of a spectacular shoreline resort built by two imaginary Connecticut casino tribes-and how, one September, Darke House and its surroundings are threatened by two storms-one, a vicious hurricane from the physical world, and the other, a monstrous storm from the world beyond. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: P. K. Collier is a Connecticut Yankee with green eyes and yellow-brown hair (these days, enhanced with yellow-brown hair color) who was bitten by the fiction-writing bug several years ago. Darke House is her first novel. She has a special fondness for black cats, but she's never seen a ghost, has only had one brush with anything paranormal, and has had only two genuine premonitions in herlifetime. Since those things don't exactly put one comfortably into the "write what you know" groove, how on earth she ever ended up writing a ghost story will remain one of her life's happy little mysteries.