From These Dark Abodes

by Lyndsie Manusos

St. Edah's, a house without Lethe and Petunia are mortal prisoners, servants to immortal creatures who unzip from their skin each night and party as skeletons.

Lethe has no memory of how she came to be trapped in this nightmare, only that despite the tenderness she feels for Petunia, she must escape. Together, they traverse the infinite house, searching for passage while finding evidence of their former lives-lives that are not what they believed them to be.

Lethe must Join the immportals in their revelry or escape St. Edah's once and for all.

Genres: Horror, Novella, Fantasy, Fiction, Literary Fiction, LGBT

115 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 17, 2024

About the author

Lyndsie Manusos’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and other publications. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prize and appeared on Locus Magazine's Annual Recommended Reading List.

Her debut novella, FROM THESE DARK ABODES, is forthcoming from Psychopomp press in Summer 2024.

She lives in central Indiana with her family, where she works as a bookseller for her local indie, Wild Geese Bookshop. She also is a senior contributor at Book Riot.

Reviews

[Books_the_Magical_Fruit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quick, horrifyingly interesting novella. It did not go as I expected in the slightest. You, too, will wonder where the main characters came from and why they can’t leave. It’s a scary mystery that unravels little by little.

Trigger warning: body horror, and lots of it. Don’t read this if you are squeamish.

Thank you to NetGalley and Psychopomp for an eARC in exchange for my honest feedback.

[Jeremy Schwab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read and reviewed for the 2025 SFINCS Novella Championship, “From These Dark Abodes” by Lyndsie Manusos is a dark, disturbing, morbid experience that introduces its readers to a Gothic like telling of the Macabre, otherworldly powers, deception and personal release. As a finalist in this amazing competition, Lyndsie has revealed, in jarring fashion…why she's made it here, and why readers will be hard pressed to escape her creative and unique house of horrors! 👀

Generally, works such as this are aimed and devoured by a smaller pool of fiction fanatics…but I'm here to tell you, the ensnaring style of oddly addictive writing that Manusos presents to us, will undoubtedly have any that, willingly, dare step into this sanctuary of terrors and revelry…completely enveloped in the experience and unable to leave its ever-changing “Dark Abodes”. 😈

Without spoiling the jaw dropping atrocities that awaits readers in the pages of this quick stay in torment and hell… I'll do my best to give you a quick glimpse through the peephole, into the abode of St. Edah’s. 🤫

Through the dark and morbid hallways of this home for the immortal, we follow the POV of Lethe and her only source of real…Petunia. Trapped in the walls of this terror-filled nightmare, both are forced to serve and endure the judgment, mental abuse, and terrifying abilities of the home's occupants and their nightly revelry's or “release” from the imperfections they wish to “willingly” shed and forget. Wanting nothing more than to escape this nightmare…both spend endless days searching for their way to freedom, only to be blocked at every turn and room, leading them back to the vile and torturous nights of servitude. Vivid and descriptive scenes of grotesque acts involving the body, accompany poetic depictions of stories from the underworld. Love and betrayal taint the air and coat the floors of this story, along with the brandy and blood…those looking to forget, may be forced to reveal their truths. 🤐

As like the flow of a river, this story will sweep you into its currents, drag you to dark depths, pull you through its unknown paths, batter you along the way, and when you've almost lost yourself to its grasp… allows you that gasp of air and glimpse of what could be. What is real and what can be trusted? Hope isn't something that exists within these walls, and deception lurks around the corner. I've almost said too much…twists and turns will keep the pages turning and your heart rate raised. Enter at your own risk…and stay for the party! 😏

4⭐ is the award I give to this dance in the dark. Erie feelings and an unsettling itch will ensnare you, right down to your very bones…grab a Brandy, step out of yourself for a bit…and revel in the release! Lyndsie invites you in for the festivities, and what an experience you are about to have! 🥃💀

[Tabitha Tomala · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review is also featured on Behind the Pages: From These Dark Abodes

From These Dark Abodes introduces readers to a world where characters leave their worries behind with their skins. All but Lethe and Petuni, who are trapped serving the skeletons of the immortals. Night after night, the skeletons overindulge in revelry, though their bones need no sustenance. And night after night, Lethe and Petunia struggle to remember who they are, and search for an escape to their endless servitude.

The visualization of characters removing their skins and organs was terrifying. And yet the writing is able to grant grace and beauty as well. There is both a tenderness in how the skeletons intertwine with one another and a sharp realization of the horrors one must endure to serve them. But it isn't just the visualizations that will enthrall readers. The story readers believe they are reading will twist and break free just as the skeletons do. Taking readers in completely new directions and exposing how the revelry came to be and the betrayal that took place to bring it to life.

​With From These Dark Abodes Lyndsie Manusos has captured a physical manifestation of stepping out of our lives and the responsibilities we carry. But in the end, escaping responsibilities is just a brief moment of reprieve, for they come calling sooner than later. This is a must for readers who enjoy gothic horror.

[Helyna Clove]

Read for SFINCS. Review to come!

[Angela Boord · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Read for SFINCS3 Finals. This is only my opinion and may not reflect the opinion of the team*

This was another horror story where the MC is suffering amnesia, and another story in which I felt like it was handled well. All in all, From These Dark Abodes turned out to be one of my favorites of the competition. Manusos infuses mythology and folklore into a modern Gothic with deeply personal and emotional stakes, and I liked it a lot.

Lethe and Petunia are servants in a great Victorian mansion they can't escape, where the residents spend their nights stripping off their skins and dancing in their bones. This is a terrifically creepy process and described well enough it gave me shivers. Lethe and Petunia can't remember how they came to be trapped in the house and face a terrible choice--join the skeletons in their eternal dancing or serve them eternally in their hedonistic entitlement. Then one of the skeletons carelessly leaves his skin outside his door. This begins a process of discovery for Lethe in which she realizes that all is not what it seems in this huge, awful place.

From These Dark Abodes contained just the right mixture of creepy horror, dark mythological fantasy and unrequited yearning for me, and the story it spun felt like it really arose organically from inside the MC. Many stories in this competition have felt to me like they leaned either toward vibes or plot, sacrificing one for the other, but From These Dark Abodes has both. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric story, courtesy of the author's descriptive skills and the choice of setting, but the plot and the pacing felt solid to me, too. The events of the outside plot are emotionally impactful, and much of the conflict comes from inside Lethe herself as she seeks ruthlessly for clues to the life she can't remember, while also battling the temptation to surrender and join the skeletons.

Lethe is a prickly protagonist who is nevertheless fiercely protective of Petunia, and I think the author did an excellent job of painting a complicated, three-dimensional portrait of her and her often opposite yearnings in a very short space. The twist was also a good one or at least I didn't see it coming exactly, and I felt like the ending fulfilled the story in a bittersweet way that made it linger. Honestly, for a long time I had no idea how I was going to do this review because I couldn’t really think of anything to say except yes, I liked it!

If I had one small quibble, it was only that I didn't know why an important character left everything alone as long as they did. It felt like there wasn’t really a reason for it except that it was necessary to have the story happen. But in the end, that certainly didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story as a whole.

If you’re looking for a character-driven standalone dark fantasy full of sapphic yearning, Gothic imagery, and mythological echoes, I highly recommend giving this one a try.

[Isabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how the beginning of From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos focused on building a sense of dread for something we didn’t understand yet. Though it did feel slow and didn’t draw me in right away, I can appreciate that now that I’ve finished it.

This story was unexpected to me. That somewhat slow feeling persisted throughout, though I think that was more the vibes rather than the actual story. Despite the dread and obvious abuse, there was almost a comfort deep down as well? I don’t even know how to explain it.

Once it did pick up its pace and one reveal after another happened, I couldn’t look away anymore, and I really enjoyed how everything came together.

I do have to mention one thing though. I don’t usually comment on this during reviews, but since this is for a competition, I’ll make an exception. Multiple submitted books, including this one, have been advanced review copies with misspellings, grammar mistakes, etc. throughout, and I want to recommend not doing so in the future because if there are several books I’ve loved and want to recommend moving forward in a competition, I have to look at the whole package so the ones with better proofreading might win out if it comes down to the details. I did obviously enjoy this one, but whether there has been further editing after ARCs go out or not, you want to put your best foot forward and submit the final copy rather than one that feels unfinished.

[Ai Jiang]

A big thank you to the publisher for an early copy of FTDA! My blurb below!

FROM THESE DARK ABODES is an intricately crafted labyrinth with hidden spaces in between that weaves together decadent body horror, complex relationships—intimate like hugging bones, exposed like peeled back skin—told through prose with an intoxicating atmospheric pull, crawling with sensory details.

[Noel Cober · Rating 3 out of 5]

From These Dark Abodes is about mortality, memory, love, and lesbian rivers.

Lethe and her partner in service Petunia are maids in a rotting house filled with monsters. Cursed to serve the immortal, debauched gods who shed their skin each night and revel in their infinity, they desperately seek a way out. Then one of the supposedly eternal skeleton-gods is killed, and the two women’s endless routine is washed away in a current of revelations, betrayals and desires.

It was clear from the outset what From These Dark Abodes was going to be about. The relationship between Lethe and Petunia is on page from the beginning—they’re the only characters who speak for the first two chapters—and that’s something I like about it. It anchors the reader because the rest of the book is, at least at first, somewhat intentionally opaque. There are a lot of questions about the setting and characters and premise that are answered as time goes on, but it doesn’t matter because none of those are what the book is about; it’s about the growing, or perhaps unfolding, relationship between the two human women.

I spent about half the book being somewhat confused about why Lethe was the main character. Petunia was clearly the character who the story was orbiting even from the first chapter, and that only became more clear as the story progressed. Petunia is so obviously not the murderer that when the characters laugh off the possibility, you laugh with them, which made me wonder why she wasn’t the perspective character, since it would have increased how mysterious Lethe, with her complete memory loss, was. It becomes obvious halfway through why this was necessary, but I must admit that I still feel the book could have worked with Petunia as the perspective character; some of the emotional beats at the end may have been felt even more strongly that way, in my opinion.

I wish there had been a little more time spent with the side characters too; we end up knowing fairly little about them and so for me, the reveal of who the murderer turns out to be isn’t as satisfying as I’d like, because they, along with most of the characters, had had so little focus in the story that I didn’t feel much in the way of attachment to them. I’m normally a fan of a lot of characters, but I do wonder if From These Dark Abodes might have benefited from two fewer characters, to let us pay more attention to the ones who were there. I liked all the characters, but in many cases that like felt superficial, mostly that I enjoyed how they were described or what they represented in the story, moreso than liking the characters themselves. There are also a lot of rapid-fire reveals about a lot of the characters that don’t necessarily feel rushed, but which for me didn’t add a huge amount to my reading.

Something shifts in From These Dark Abodes after the first of its three parts. It starts out being written in a very folkloric/mythological register, with a strong focus on its macabre and gothic ambiguity. You don’t really know what’s happening and that’s cool because it’s atmospheric and moody and also you already know that’s just the plot, it’s not really what the story is about anyway. Then, somewhat abruptly in my opinion, the tone shifts to something a bit more modern and casual (a useage of the word ‘ginormous’ really struck me as odd; not because of the word itself but because of how much it wasn’t the kind of language I expected in a book like with these vibes) that for me at least threw off the way I’d been reading the book and made me unsure of how to interact with it. The ambiguity that was doing a lot for the book also fades away very crisply as the third quarter of the book is given over to detailed explanations and flashbacks that explain everything that’s going on and what all the major characters’ motivations are, which I know many readers appreciate but I personally did not.

I liked a lot of things about From These Dark Abodes, and a lot of things about the main characters, and I really liked Lethe and Petunia’s relationship and how it progressed a lot. Lyndsie Manusos did a really wonderful job sticking the landing with them, in my opinion. I think that anyone who’s interested in unusual and interesting takes on mythologies and folklores, or who likes stories that think really hard about immortality and death, or who likes the less predictable variety of darker sapphic romance, should give From These Dark Abodes a try!

[S. Bavey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read and reviewed From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos as part of the SFINCS3 novella contest. My review is honest, and my opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my team (Team TBR).

From These Dark Abodes is a tale full of characters with names from mythology, but rather than being set in the Underworld, we find ourselves inside a dilapidated gothic manor house.

Lethe and Petunia are the horrified servants to a group of skin-shedding skeletons who party all night while their captive servants bring them drinks and rewind the gramophone when needed. It is a pitiful, hideous existence that they dread every day as they clean up after the revelries and search the manor for a nonexistent escape route.

Details about Lethe and Petunia’s pasts are gradually revealed as the story develops until we get to a big reveal for Lethe, which I will not spoil here. Petunia’s devastation at having been captured away from her new baby and husband is heartbreaking, and Lethe’s unrequited romantic feelings for Petunia are palpable. These characters are so well-written, I was quickly rooting for them to discover some kind of escape route.

The skeletons are cruel and hedonistic. They are eager to shed their skins and their humanity as soon as their hostess and leader, Erinyes, gives them the opportunity each evening:

“…everyone had a reason for wanting to leave their own body. A trauma to escape from, to unzip from their skins and celebrate a night without its heaviness.”

The act of shedding their skins is repulsive to the two servant girls, and they try to be absent from the parlour when it happens:

“Rhada reached behind his head, grasped his hair, and pulled forward. The skin on his face began to loosen and fall limp. His forehead wrinkled and flopped. His scalp came off first, obscuring his face. Bright hazel eyes pinched and squelched, popping from the sockets.”

From These Dark Abodes is a gripping mixture of Greek mythology and dark, gothic horror with atmospheric prose that had me hooked from the beginning. I loved it and would urge anyone who enjoys gothic horror, mythology, and original story ideas to give it a try!

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very unexpected. I definitely cringed at some of the descriptions - it was a bit horrifying in spots. A quick thriller with some heavy underlying themes (specifically postpartum depression). I couldn’t put it down because I wasn’t sure what would happen next. I would classify this as a horror/thriller with a love interest. I kind of wish the book was longer to get into more details regarding the characters. 4⭐️ would recommend if horror/thriller is your cup of tea

[Ariana Weldon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full RTC!

[Lexi Denee · Rating 5 out of 5]

At 130 pages, These Dark Abodes is the perfect one-sitting morsel to get ready for spooky season. Filled with body horror and questions of morality (and humanity,) I am already looking forward to reading this one again.

Lethe and Petunia are trapped in a never ending house without a door to the outside. They are tasked with serving the occupants of the house when they throw down and party each night. The jump scare part of this is that the occupants of the house peel out of their skin each night to dance around as skeletons.

Beautifully written and insightful enough to make me question the weight of my own skin. Check this one out if you like body horror, haunted houses, and questioning everything!

This is an ARC so quotes may differ from finished copy:

“She held sway over the house, its occupants, and controlled who could unzip from their skins.”

“Even so, everyone had a reason for wanting to leave their own body. A trauma to escape from, to unzip from their skins and celebrate a night without its heaviness.”

**Thank you to NetGalley and Psychopomp for the eARC of this terrifying title!**

[Julia Ember · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinarily strange novella, but the body horror is somehow beautiful, the mythos cleverly incorporated. Dark, queer and devour-able in one sitting!

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review: https://beforewegoblog.com/sfincs-rev...

From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos is an ambitious Gothic novella that, in the tradition of Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi uses the construct of an endless labyrinthine prison to approach the subject of depression. Lush prose and a more surreal atmosphere in the first half combine with a more literalized and plot-driven story in the second, potentially opening up the book to a wider variety of readers. Despite the above comparisons, I’d most recommend this one to fans of Premee Mohamed’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight and Catherynne M. Valente’s Comfort Me With Apples, which likewise deal with real-world feminist concerns through allegory and the fantastic.

It’s hard to write meaningfully about the plot of From These Dark Abodes without spoilers. When the novella opens, we’re in the POV of a woman named Lethe. Lethe, along with her companion Petunia, are servants in a vast hall called St. Edah’s (hah!) that’s occupied and governed by several underworld figures. Each night, these figures unzip their skin and cavort together at a raucous party as skeletons. As Lethe’s name suggests, our POV lacks concrete memories of any life prior to her appearance in the house, though Petunia clings to scraps of an earlier existence that seems to involve a baby. The first half of the novella feels largely symbolic, and tends to emphasize lyrical prose over concrete detail. However, when one of the skeletal party guests turns up truly dead, the mystery of Petunia’s identity–as well as the reason for the house’s existence–becomes the focus of the story, as Manusos lays out the meaning and backstory that led to Petunia and Lethe’s present circumstances.

It’s undeniable that Manusos is an incredible talent and the creative scope of Dark Abodes is impressive. As a horror fan who loves surrealist approaches to the genre, I was easily hooked by the nightmarescape atmosphere that Manusos constructs for Lethe and Petunia. While on the surface, St. Edah’s lacks the obvious horror of some genre settings, it’s Lethe and Petunia’s unsteady senses of self that produces a destabilizing effect and which acts as the generative force behind the novella’s creepy atmosphere. There’s also some exquisitely described gore here and there that I’d be remiss not to mention, with the “unzipping” delightfully horrific without veering into comedy–a delicate balance that Manusos handles with real skill.

As a character, Lethe is somewhat hard to get a true sense of, but given her name and the context of the story, that’s not a surprise (and isn’t necessarily a drawback). While the novella is fundamentally about personal experiences of depression, and while the symbolic world of the novella lies at the heart of Petunia and Lethe’s circumstances, Dark Abodes is much more of an atmosphere and idea-driven book than it is invested in character voice. Readers interested in the ways in which the fantastical can be used to address real-world issues and themes are thus most likely to appreciate what Manusos is exploring. That’s not to say that the themes and backstory motivating Petunia and Lethe aren’t rich (they are both rich and important), but that the novella is most invested in exploring character as concept.The cast is rounded out by the skeletal overlords who order Lethe and Petunia about. These characters act largely as archetypes, and readers who enjoy contemporary reimaginings of mythological characters in fantasy settings may well find something new in Dark Abodes. Of particular note is the somewhat sadistic and taunting leader of the immortals–Erinyes (used in the plural to refer to a single person), who seems to delight in Lethe and Petunia’s confusion and suffering.

Despite the clear talent on display from Manusos, Dark Abodes was somewhat of an uneven read for me. I was most compelled by one of the novella’s later passages, in which we learn Petunia’s backstory (along with a somewhat Peter Beagle-esque section involving a talking rat named Bloody-Bones). In Petunia’s backstory section there’s a deeper sense of the truly human stakes at play, as well as a greater sense of rootedness in something meaningful. Throughout the rest of the novella, unfortunately, I found that there was a prevailing sense of disconnection between the words on page and the themes and symbolism Manusos was playing with. The prose in the first section is, as mentioned, often beautiful and remarkable, yet it sometimes lacks a greater meaning behind the gorgeous language, something disguised by the prettiness of the word choice or a certain grammatical and contextual vagueness. I did also experience a lot of tonal whiplash from Dark Abodes. While its opening section is mood and atmosphere-driven (vibesy as the kids say), the second half of the book felt much more like a standard fantasy, invested in the various powers of the skeletons and a very literal storyline that didn’t quite fit inside the book’s small pagecount. The narrative here is propelled largely by a series of reveals (reveals to do with the origins of each of the skeleton overlords, the purported symbolism of shedding one’s skin, the reason for the construction of St. Edah’s, Lethe and Petunia’s true natures, and the culprit behind the murder). Much of this section felt a little too much like an infodump–a justification for the novella’s premise rather than an exploration of its weightier themes. While one of the skeletons provides an on-page explanation of the novella’s symbolism (one they later trouble), it never quite felt that the trappings of the house and its backstory married well with the more impactful and gutting experiences Manusos expertly addresses in the Petunia/backstory section. I was left with a sense of Manusos as a very ambitious, gifted, and compelling writer, but who had perhaps made some unsound structural and tonal choices in this one work. As someone who’s attempted to marry the symbolic, mythological, and the pop-fantastical in a short story (much less successfully than Manusos does here, I should note), I’m sympathetic to the challenges involved when combining such different tones and concepts, which has added another layer of diffulty for me in terms of writing this review.

I genuinely can’t wait to read more from Manusos, who is already a highly accomplished short story writer with a number of prestigious accolades to her name, and with whom I share an investment in the ways in which the mythological and fantastical can be used to explore real-world mental health struggles. While I have issues with how Dark Abodes shakes out, it’s very apparent that Manusos can write and that she has meaningful things to say.

[Lilly Lockwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first started reading From These Dark Abodes I wasn't sure it was going to click for me. I felt like the prose was a little too poetic/flowery for my tastes. But, as I read further, I found myself fully immersed in Lethe and Petunia's story. There are some fantastically described moments of body horror woven together with an intense longing we feel with Lethe, for memories of her past life, for Petunia, and for a way out of St. Edah's house.

Manusos does a wonderful job at weaving in little hints as to the true nature of the house and the inhabitants roles within it (which I won't spoil for you here because it was truly a miraculous thing to experience firsthand).

Some things that stood out to me about the story.

The way Manusos describes sensory details is so visceral. It made my skin crawl every time I read a description of one of the immortals peeling their skin off to reveal their skeletons beneath. The tenderness between Lethe and Petunia, the way the support each other and push each other to keep living another day in the hopes they'll finally find their escape. The character Bloody Bones the rat was a big highlight for me, I love a gross, weird little guy and he is the grossest and weirdest of little guys.

I honestly have no criticisms of this story. I would talk about it more but I really don't want to spoil the experience for you. This is one of those books that is best experienced with little knowledge of what it's about. From These Dark Abodes will stick with me for a long time. A story of love, loss, and a desire for freedom, this story will be best enjoyed by those who like rich prose, body horror, and tales that divert your expectations.

[Emi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Publishing date: 17.09.2024
Thank you to Netgalley and Psychopomp for the ARC. My opinions are my own. 


The book as a meal: No food for me, whisky on the rocks only 
The book left me: Feeling a deep sense of dread 


Negatives:
Wished it was longer
The twist came a little suddenly 


Positives:
Sublime vibes
Will stick with me for a long time
Great writing


Features: 
A labyrinthine house with horrific hosts, a lowkey murder mystery, LGBTQ rep, a character that does not know who they are or how they got here


Why did I choose this one?
The cover is stunning, the combination of genres is right up my alley, and  the blurb gave just enough intrigue to really want to read it. It seemed like just the book for me. 


Pick-up-able? Put-down-able?
Very pick-up-able. This book got its claws in me almost immediately. You get thrown into it from the beginning and you really want to see what happens next.


What was the vibe and mood?
Claustrophobic. Wandering a labyrinth. The floor is sticky. The air is stale. The smell of alcohol, blood, and putrid meat follows my every step. I am not safe. I am not free. I am being watched everywhere I go. 


Final ranking and star rating?
A tier, 4 stars. This book was just wonderful and I really enjoyed it. The only downer is the twist at the end and the fact that it was very short. I wished for more and I wished for a different outcome. Even so, I am thoroughly satisfied and I will be strongly recommending this in the future. 

[Jordan Dailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I visited the quaint little bookstore known as Wild Geese Bookshop I did so based on my wife’s recommendation. When I asked the staff for something to read I was handed several books and then almost as an afterthought they handed me this book. Not certain the recommendation was about the book’s quality as much as it may have been for the fact it was the owners own published work I somewhat reluctantly accepted it.

Despite not being something I would normally read, I am pleased to say that I was hooked from nearly the beginning. The concept, the storytelling, the sentence structures… I’m not quite able to put a finger on it, but something about this novella grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let it go. A definite surprise and a tremendously wonderful journey which has further solidified that asking others to share their literary taste and basing my purchases from that once again did not disappoint.

[Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

This book was a beautifully atmospheric book with absolutely lilting prose. There was so much worldbuilding in here for such a short novella, and I will say the substance of my critique is that I wish this were longer. There's a lot in here to see, and there's some really prosaic descriptions of appalling body horror in here.

I really did enjoy this book, but I wished it was longer and a bit more fleshed out. The characters could have done with a bit more development, but they are described well, and what we are given of them was nicely done and felt like it was piecemeal on purpose. This one is well worth the read, particularly if you can deal with body horror without flinching.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely, eerie queer novella. Petunia and Lethe are stuck in an underworld mansion with no exit, St. Edah's. They're made to serve the immortals there who shed their skin every evening to party as skeletons. But then one of the skeletons goes missing. They're supposed to be immortal, but maybe that promise is a lie. Meanwhile, Petunia's memories slowly leak through the spell she's under, though Lethe still can't remember anything.

[Myna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The gothic setup and characters hooked me immediately. Lethe and Petunia are such compelling characters; I felt invested in their plight, and I enjoyed the reveal of the mystery surrounding their identities. The descriptions of the house & the revelries are strong--the scenes came to life as I read. This is a hell of a horror story, with gorgeous language and characters I won't soon forget. Definitely recommend for horror fans!

[Bethie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novella and I think it works for the type of story it is because the entirety of it is quite intense and dark. Lethe and Petunia are mortal prisoners, servants to immortal creatures who unzip from their skin each night and party as skeletons. Such a bizarre concept but I loved it, and the imagery really sold it. There was a feeling of dread the entire time I was reading it. Highly recommend.

[E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I edited this, so yes I've read it. A perilous journey through a house that does not wish to give up its people. A heartfelt romance, and an exploration of postpartum depression that you don't often see in speculative work.

[samar · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very very weird book that goes in completely unexpected places. i think i found some bits jarring -- modernity chafing against the fantasy -- but i was very much intrigued by the ideas on display. this was the perfect length for what it was.

[Carlie St. George]

Oh, the body horror in this one is exquisite. For me, the story really picks up in Part 2 and doesn’t stop from there. I particularly enjoyed how the story moves from an eerie, gothic sort of horror to something much more visceral and grotesque. Strange and dark and lovely.

[Maria Dong · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely gorgeous, moody novella with spectacularly original wordbuilding. Moody, deeply psychological, and very queer (in all the possible connotations of the word). I absolutely adored this read and shot through the entire thing in one sitting.

[Annika Barranti Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read an early version of this book and it's incredible! Full thoughts to follow when I get an ARC of the edited version.

[Samantha Hehr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lethe and Petunia scour St Edah's in search of a way out. Each day, they must serve its macabre inhabitants- ethereal gods and goddesses who shed their skin and revel as skeletons.

[Eugenia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both mysterious and intimate, From These Dark Abodes will enthrall you and make you fall in love with all the charming imperfections of humanity.

[Susie Dumond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chilling, atmospheric, queer horror novella that gets its claws in you right from the start! Perfect spooky season reading!

[Tara Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vivid, haunting, and unique, this slim volume plays by its own rules, keeping you guessing with each turn down a dark new hallway.