Gothictown

Manhattan chef Billie Hope is grieving the collapse of her once-thriving restaurant when an email arrives from Juliana, a small Georgia town offering newcomers a spacious Victorian house for a single dollar, plus jobs, affordability, and the warm embrace of a tight community.

Worn down by city life, Billie persuades her husband Peter to leave their cramped rental and move south with their young daughter to start over. At first “Gentle Juliana” seems like the fresh beginning she needs.

But unsettling dreams begin to disturb her sleep, her marriage frays, and the town’s elders, all descended from its founding families, exert a control that feels less like hospitality than a leash. The deeper Billie settles in, the more she senses something rotten beneath the genteel Southern surface, a buried history the founders will go to great lengths to protect.

As the cost of that one-dollar house comes due, she must decide how far she will go to keep her family safe. Atmospheric and slow-burning, the novel turns the fantasy of small-town reinvention into a study of debt, belonging, and the price communities exact from those they invite in.