14

Nate Tucker is behind on rent and unhappy at his data entry job. A cheap apartment in an old Los Angeles brownstone called the Kavach looks like exactly what he needs. He signs the lease first and notices the details after: four padlocks on apartment fourteen's door, and a kitchen light that glows black no matter which bulb goes into it.

Every other tenant is sitting on an oddity of their own. Veek's apartment hides something none of them can explain. Once Nate starts comparing notes across the hall, the building's separate little mysteries start looking like pieces of one design, built up over more than a hundred years.

The book reads as horror-inflected science fiction, paced like a locked-room mystery. One answer opens the next door rather than closing the story down, and the unease builds steadily before the plot turns and speeds up. It plays out as an ensemble as much as it is Nate's story, the tenants working the puzzle together rather than one hero solving it alone.

14 is the first novel in Peter Clines's Threshold series, followed by The Fold.