Horrid

After her father's sudden death, Jane North-Robinson and her mother Ruth leave California for North Manor, Ruth's decaying childhood home in small-town Maine, a house the locals call the creep house. Jane, a bookish teenager who manages her anger by eating pages from books, starts school, takes a job at a bookstore and makes friends, but the townspeople are hostile and a local bully takes an interest in her.

Her mother keeps a room in the house locked. As lost time, violent outbursts and the feeling that someone else is in the house pile up, Jane begins to suspect that her mother and the town are hiding a family secret. The novel keeps asking whether what Jane experiences is grief and mental illness or something more horrid, and builds to an ending reviewers call shocking.