DEAD RECKONING

From the Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows: to find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.

Horrible events keep on happening in Edresh. Some die of unknown causes with prior warning. Some disappear without leaving a trace. Some fall ill with no cure. The rest, the luckier ones, live their lives in a desolate monotony. Oliver Litost is of the last group, an orphan teen always tending to the churchyard, spending more time with the dead than with the living.

It's only when an unknown man shows up to the graveyard, standing before a tomb no one else had ever grieved in front of before, that things start to change and make sense. There is something wicked hiding in Edresh, and every second it's alive, it gets more and more dangerous, and there's no choice but to find it, lest all of the town is completely doomed to wilt away like a forgotten flower.