The Goat in Human Skin

Northern Appalachia, a mountain hollow, a winter with no electricity and no road out. Dovie Marsh, 19, is home from college for the break. She is the younger child, the one nobody listens to, and the one who notices everything. Her brother Caleb went up the ridge with a friend and came back wrong: a wet plate, a chair that creaks in an empty room, a voice that cannot pronounce a family word. Something is wearing her brother's skin, it is polite, hungry, patient, and currently sitting in the family's best chair while her mother makes it tea. Her father is stubborn, silent and quick with the shotgun; her mother would walk into the snow barefoot for her; the dog is thirteen and half blind, which is exactly the point. The house cannot agree on what is inside it, and the thing inside it is counting on that. Every escalation comes from domestic detail, never from explanation, and every night costs the family one more chance to act together.