THE SHORT COUNT
In the summer of 2014, four teenagers on a Maine blueberry barren invented a monster to cover up the money they were stealing - and then they made the...
About this ebook
THE SHORT COUNT by Julian Ashvale is available in the Ebokio digital catalog as an EPUB ebook.
Price: £8.50. Language: English. Categories: Horror.
In the summer of 2014, four teenagers on a Maine blueberry barren invented a monster to cover up the money they were stealing - and then they made the youngest of them write down the rules. Twelve years later, the rules still work.
Vesta Preble is fifteen years old, the fastest hand on the Bramhall barrens, and the only person in Washington County who has never once come up short.
She has spent her whole life carrying a surname that everybody here says with a half-second of silence in front of it, because her uncle stole from this ground before she was born and walked off it one night in August and never came home. Now something is out on the burn.
It works only on ground that has been burned. It cannot cross standing water. It stops when the whistle goes. It wears the coat of the last person who saw it. And it comes one raking lane nearer every single time a count anywhere on that ground comes up short.
There is a number chalked on the side of the winnower trailer. Everyone in three towns has been watching it fall since before Vesta was born, and nobody will tell her what it counts.
She is about to find out that it is a distance, that it is nearly used up, and that the only person alive who can settle what is owed is somebody who owes nothing at all.
THE SHORT COUNT is a novel about work, wages, and what a county does with a person it has decided not to count.
It is rural gothic with a paid-by-the-box economy under it, a horror story with a ledger, and a slow, warm, funny, devastating book about ordinary people who are worth loving before they are worth fearing for.
Its dread is arithmetical: you always know exactly how close the danger is, and you can do nothing at all with the information.
For readers of Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Catriona Ward and Andrew Michael Hurley - and for anyone who has ever handed in a day's work and let somebody else do the counting. Read the last chapter with the light on.
Then tell somebody what you think the ending cost - and please leave a review, because a book like this one only ever travels the way this one's story travelled: from one reader to the next.
Book details
Details: 234 pages, about 65,482 words, published by Julian Ashvale, publication date 6 September 2026.
Estimated reading time: about 4.5 hours.
Format, language, and reading
THE SHORT COUNT 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.
Buyers can use Ebokio reading tools where supported, including adjustable themes and fonts, AI read aloud and text to speech, summaries, and Ask This Book for eligible owned titles.
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