Paul Oren needs only one thing: a quiet room in which to finish his novel.

He finds it in an old red-brick house on a forgotten dead-end street — pale rooms, carved woodwork, high ceilings, and a rent low enough for a writer with almost no money left. At first the house seems a gift. Then Oren stops writing. The rooms grow more beautiful. His unfinished novel begins to seem false. His loyal friend Elsie Bengough, who loves him more than he has allowed himself to see, warns him that he will never finish the book there.

The house appears to agree.

A nail cuts Elsie’s wrist. A stair breaks beneath her foot. A dripping tap becomes an old song. And one night, in the dark, Oren hears the impossible sound of a woman brushing her hair.

So begins The House That Turned, a collection of nine strange tales about art, obsession, guilt, haunting, and the thin place where imagination becomes possession. Across haunted rooms, ghost ships, pursuing doubles, doomed artists, uncanny objects, and domestic terrors, Oren is forced to confront the question at the centre of his life: what does a writer owe to his work, and what must he refuse to sacrifice to it?

Atmospheric, psychological, and quietly devastating, The House That Turned is a book of literary horror in which the supernatural is never merely a ghost. It is memory. Desire. Conscience. The dead weight of beauty. The pressure of unfinished work.

And sometimes it is a house that knows exactly whom it wants to keep.