Award-winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher, presents a terrifying tale of hidden worlds and monstrous creations...
Recently divorced and staring down the barrel of moving back in with her parents, Carrot really needs a break. And a place to live. So when her Uncle Earl, owner of the eclectic Wonder Museum, asks her to stay with him in exchange for cataloguing the exhibits, of course she says yes.
The Wonder Museum is packed with taxidermy, shrunken heads, and an assortment of Mystery Junk. For Carrot, it's not creepy at all: she grew up with it. What's creepy is the hole that's been knocked in one of the museum walls, and the corridor behind it. There's just no space for a corridor in the museum's thin walls - or the concrete bunker at the end of it, or the strange islands beyond the bunker's doors, or the whispering, unseen things lurking in the willow trees.
Carrot has stumbled into a strange and horrifying world, and They are watching her. Strewn among the islands are the remains of Their meals - and Their experiments. And even if she manages to make it back home again, she can't stop calling Them after her...
T. Kingfisher is the adult fiction pseudonym of Ursula Vernon, the Hugo Award-winning author of Digger and Dragonbreath. Perhaps best known for her children's fiction, she is an author and illustrator based in North Carolina who has been nominated for the Ursa Major Award, the Eisner Awards, and has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for "Jackalope Wives" in 2015 and the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "the Tomato Thief" in 2017.