The Keeping Season
For seven months of the year, the ground at Keever, Alaska will not take a grave - so the winter's dead wait in a concrete building on the hill, and...
About this ebook
The Keeping Season by Alaric Wrenford is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £10.99. Language: English. Categories: Horror.
For seven months of the year, the ground at Keever, Alaska will not take a grave - so the winter's dead wait in a concrete building on the hill, and somebody has to be paid to sit with them.
Sixty-one gravel miles from the highway, the frost goes down eleven feet by February and there is no way to bury anybody until May.
The dead go into the Cold House instead: fourteen bays, one steel door, two thermometers, and a card of seven rules typed in 1961 and taped to the inside of the door. Read the glass at six and at six. Log every name the day it comes in. Sit the first night with each one.
And, last: if you are spoken to, do not answer. If you are called by your name, do not answer. Audra Brekke takes the job because she is thirty-four, broke, and unemployable in the only work she was ever good at. For nine years she was an emergency dispatcher.
Two winters ago she kept a young man talking for fifty-one minutes while he froze in a truck she could not find, and she has listened to the recording four hundred times since, and she is looking for work in which nobody can be failed because everybody is already dead.
The town hires her in nine minutes without asking a single question, and she is grateful, and she does not wonder why. The dark comes down. The temperature falls past forty below.
And on a night in the last week of December, alone in an unheated porch with the light off, Audra hears - on the other side of a door that has been shut since 1927 - the small, live, unmistakable sound of a line being held open.
Then something says her name in a voice she has been listening to for two years.
A cold, quiet, meticulously real novel about grief, isolation and the price a community will let somebody else pay, THE KEEPING SEASON is a slow-burn horror story for readers of Shirley Jackson, Michelle Paver and Catriona Ward - a book with no monster in it, no gore, and one question that will keep you up: what do we owe the people we could not save?
Read it with the heating on. And when you have finished it - when you have decided, as every reader must, which of the two explanations you believe - please leave a review and tell the next reader nothing. Let them find the door for themselves.
Book details
Details: 282 pages, about 78,845 words, published by Alaric Wrenford, publication date 5 September 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 5.5 hours.
Format, language, and reading
The Keeping Season is delivered as an EPUB ebook in English, and reads on phone, tablet, or computer through the Ebokio web reader with no app to install and no DRM.
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