THE DEBUT NOVEL BY IAN ROGERS
The Bennett family is broken. After a series of devastating events, they leave their old lives behind and start over in a new town. The move is supposed to give them a chance to heal and to help mend their familial bonds, but they soon discover some wounds run deeper than others, and they always leave scars.
And there’s something seriously wrong with their new house.
There’s a presence lurking within the walls, walking the halls at night, and it seems to know everything about the Bennetts. Their secrets, their desires…and their fears.
What starts out as mild paranormal activity quickly escalates into a full-on supernatural assault by an entity whose motives are as nebulous as its origins. If the Bennetts hope to survive, they will have to confront the horrors of their past, forgive each other for the wrongs they’ve done, and come together as a single powerful force.
As Family.
“Ian Rogers is a consummate master of supernatural terror and this, his gripping debut novel, is a startling showcase for his uncanny talents. The Bennetts — husband, wife, daughter, son — are already disintegrating as a family, riven by secrets and betrayals before they move into their new-build suburban home. But something is in there with them: a tenebrous presence that stalks its victims and feeds off the pain and fear that underscores their brittle interactions. Family is a haunted house story with a twist that keeps on twisting until it wrings the blood out of its titular subjects. Some books can only be read in the daylight hours and this is one of them.”
—David Demchuk, award-winning author of RED X and The Bone Mother
“A little bit Poltergeist, a little bit Us, a lot bit Haunting of Hill House… but mostly itself, Ian Rogers’s Family is full of hidden passageways and trap doors and secrets. This is very much a novel of 2024, though, which means the monsters are not in the house, but inside us. Unless they’re just plain us. And also in the house. As usual, Rogers proves twisty and not for the faint of heart. Except he’s also for readers who still have hearts.”
—Glen Hirshberg, author of Tell Me When I Disappear and Infinity Dreams
“In Ian Rogers’s gripping Family, the Bennetts move into their newly built house intent on starting new lives for themselves after a cascade of accidents and tragedies has brought their family to the verge of collapse. But their attempt to start over is bedeviled by an escalating series of events strange and frightening. Seriously injured in a workplace accident, father Jack struggles with hallucinations that grow in duration and vividness. Mother Laura, who has left her dream job for something less satisfying, is stalked by a monstrous creature. Daughter Jessica is plagued by visions of another, malevolent version of herself. Son Stanley finds his anxiety driven hypochondria becoming illnesses real and terrible. With expert pacing, Rogers takes the reader through the accelerating deterioration of the Bennett family, in what appears at first to be a skillful updating of the haunted house trope, but which transforms into something more distinctive and unusual. Artfully constructed, its characters drawn with a confident hand, Family evokes the classic narratives of the 1980’s without succumbing to pastiche. Instead, Ian Rogers gives a compelling portrait of a family which is the source, and just maybe, the solution to its own terrors.”
—John Langan, author of Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies