Cat’s Cradle: The Novel

By Sam Coniglio

She survived her husband. Surviving what he left behind is the hard part.

For nine years, Cathy read the level of the bourbon bottle like a clock and learned to go quiet, small, still. The night Sterling choked to death in his chair, she stood in the doorway and didn't move to save him - and what she felt afterward was relief.

To start over, she buys a crumbling house at the end of a dead-end road, miles past the last town, where no one knows her name. She wants silence. She wants to disappear.

The house has other plans.

It starts small: the smell of bourbon in a cold room, a cat's cradle drawn in the dust - the same tangled figure Sterling used to lace between their fingers when he told her there was no way out. Then comes the voice on the stairs. His voice. Calling her down, four hundred miles from his grave.

The ground here was bad long before Cathy came. It doesn't make its own horrors. It only burns what you bring to it - and Cathy brought the richest fuel a hungry house has been offered in a century: a woman trained, by an expert, to believe she deserves whatever's done to her.

To survive the longest night of the year, she'll have to go down into the dark, sit in the chair that's been waiting since the day she arrived, and refuse the one lie that's held her since the doorway in the rain.

Cat's Cradle is a novel where the haunting is the abuse - continued past death.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H4W5193Z
• ISBN13: 9798181111011
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"