Excerpt from Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PART I

A House on Hot Springs Drive

The house didn't ask for what happened, for what it had to hold, for the echoes it muffled, the wetness it dried. It was just a house, a collection of rooms. A divided space.

One of them hadn't pushed the couch all the way into the corner, so it was a spot used for the little one to hide things or hide herself or cry when she got a little older and the house wasn't so big anymore. There was a coin there still, dusty and forgotten, but at one time it had been her special thing, her beloved. The house knew how some things could feel gifted, how they suddenly appeared or were suddenly seen, how it could stop one of them in their tracks with wonder. A beam of sunlight angled through the sliding glass doors over and over and over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day after day after day, and the child played in it, the big ones stood in it with their hands on their hips, looking around, or they rushed through it, exploding the dust motes into chaos until they settled, calmed, into the beam, twirling and falling, and sometimes there was no one at all in the room, just the house and the light, and then one day the girl noticed it, saw the sunbeam, how it looked triangular, or like a blade, how it sliced into the room and was yellow but even more colors once she looked closer, and the house could do nothing but offer it. The house had no hands to wring, no shoulders to straighten, no eyes to see, no lips to lick. The house was just a house, imbued with its people and their strangeness, the loneliness they only showed to the house, the way the mother stared at herself in the mirror and pulled at her face or stood to the side and tried to make herself into a new thing, something taller and less slouched, something that smiled, something that could look at itself without trying to make itself into a new thing. Something that could endure the mirror, and the mirror in the next room, and the one in the bathroom, and the one by the door, and the one in the visor in the car, and the one in the reflection of a window, and the one inside her that showed something ruined, misshapen, discarded. The house wanted her to see the sunlight sword her daughter stood in daily now as though it filled her with something. The mother watched the daughter sometimes and in those moments the mother was beautiful, calmed, intact. The house saw how you could thrash alone to the loud music absorbed in the walls and you could throw all the pillows from your bed and you could throw something special into the trash and take it to the curb, where it was no longer of the house, and how there was power in that. In a banishment. The mother stood. Every day she stood, the way a house does, and she made her own light, the way a house does, and the house was just a house for a time. A loveliness, when a thing can just be a thing.

Does a house feel itself being noticed? Does it know its yellow windows, glimpsed from the outside, are irresistible? Is it the house's fault for offering itself up so easily, so helplessly? Anyone can open a door; that's not up to a house. Anyone can peer in, snoop around. Anyone can lie in wait. The child in her corner, the boy in the garage, always the house's shame. Its smell, its stains, its darkness. The boy, when did he get in? Had he always been there? Was he like the furnace kicking on, day after day, over and over, a rheumy inhale and then an endless, roaring exhale? Was he the mice scurrying inside the walls; was he the blown fuse, easily thrown; was he the stuck window, the loose floorboard? Was he part of the house? Did the house do that to the mother? Did the house make a mess it couldn't clean up? The house doesn't know. The house can only offer what it has: screams, and stains, and blood, and the mother, slowly sinking toward the floor. She had a name. The house used to know it.

Theresa

In the Lindens' garage there were plastic bins containing Christmas decorations, stockings and garland and the delicate papier-mâché angels and bells Cece Linden made in school that Theresa Linden wrapped in newspaper and sealed in bags, only to see that they'd flattened and crumpled as she unwrapped them every December. There were lawn tools, bicycles, old paint cans. High on the three inner walls were bare planks bracketed eighteen inches apart, shelves Adam Linden made himself shortly after the family moved in. They were too high up and the upper shelf remained empty. Lined up on the lower shelf were large plastic soda cups Adam used to store nails in every size, screws, washers, and bolts—things he'd bought in bulk over the years so he'd have something to put on the shelves. When the winter sun began to set, light streamed in through the wide, squat windows at the side of the garage that faced the Stinsons' and showed spiderwebs as thick in the corners as the whorls of hair Theresa pulled from her daughter's brush. Cece had never liked the garage. Later it would seem like a sign, something she should have paid attention to.

Excerpted from Hot Springs Drive by Stephen Hunter. Copyright © 2023 by Stephen Hunter. Excerpted by permission of Roxane Gay Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.