Alice in Shadowland

By Philip Stengel

Book Overview

When Alice was eight, a white rabbit led her to a hole in the ground. She came back wrong, and no one believed where she had been. Twenty years later, the hole came back for her.

Alice Marrow is twenty-eight and locked inside St. Dymphna's, a state asylum on the English moors, when the tapping starts behind the walls. Tick. Tock. It does not stop. A single playing card, the ace of hearts, turns up in a sealed room and will not stay gone, and when she tears it the pieces come back whole. A patient brings up wet paper stamped with one word. LATE. The smell of roses and old iron seeps under the doors. Still water and clean glass stop being safe to look into, because something on the other side is looking back. There is a court in session inside the building, and it has been waiting for her since she was a child.

The court does not want her dead. It wants her answer. A name. A yes. A single word said out loud, and it can write her into its record forever, the way it has written everyone who ever spoke back to it. The verdict is the one thing it cannot take by force. It has to be given.

A nurse named Lydia knows the only defense there is, because she has watched it work and watched it fail. Stay silent. Do not look into anything that shines. Break every mirror. Keep moving, so no surface can settle. Salt the water until it is too rough to hold a face. The rules sound like madness, and they are the only thing keeping the ward alive. The man who sits in the day room learned them too late. Two years ago he answered the court, and it owns him still, awake and breathing and already filed away. The doctor who runs the ward does not want to stop the thing in the walls. He wants to document it, and he has decided his patients are the cleanest paper to write on.

When the court finally calls her in, it calls her the Witness. There is a long table lit by candles, a jury of shadows that leans closer every time she breathes, and a gavel that should not exist. The charges are contempt, refusal, and silence. The exhibits are pulled from the throats of the people who came before her. Every word is a receipt, and even a held breath counts, because the record hears that too. To survive a trial built for one purpose, to make her speak, Alice has to do the thing the court never planned for. She has to learn its language and turn it back on the bench.

This is Wonderland with the whimsy cut out and the teeth left in. The rabbit speaks in Alice's own voice. The Queen builds her body out of wet paper, sealed court records, and other people's skin. The cards cut. The mirrors open. And getting out of St. Dymphna's is not the end of it, because the court is not the building. It is the record, and the record follows the witness. It rides the dark behind her. It writes fresh doors on every puddle and every wet pane she passes. To be free of it she cannot only run. She has to find where her name is written and unmake it, with a nurse who knows too much and a man the court already used standing as the last allies she has left.

The trial offers Alice everything she has lost, her mother's face among it, in trade for a single spoken word. The deeper the building pulls her, the louder the verdict gets, and the harder it becomes to keep her mouth shut. The court does not need to catch her. It only needs her to answer once.

A folk-horror descent into silence, testimony, and the cost of being heard, for readers who like their fairy tales told with the lights off. Some doors only open when you answer them. Alice learned that the first time, at eight years old, at the edge of a hole in the ground. This time she means to keep her mouth shut, even if the silence is the thing that kills her.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F5Q6PS3R
• ISBN13: 9798280674622
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 404 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"