Winter 1942. Portland, Maine.
When Aurelia Vautrin leaves New Orleans for a position at the Hollis Home for Aged Persons, she expects hard work, cold weather, and a house full of strangers.
She does not expect a Victory Garden growing warm beneath the snow.
At Hollis, vegetables rise from black earth in the middle of winter. The residents speak carefully around certain rooms. The staff keeps the curtains drawn during blackout drills. And when an elderly woman disappears from a hallway, the house insists she was never there at all.
Names vanish. Records change. Rooms forget the people who lived in them.
As the longest night of the year approaches, Aurelia begins keeping a private record of the lost: their names, their belongings, and the small details that prove they were real. But something beneath Hollis has been feeding for generations, turning mercy into survival and survival into a bargain no one wants to name.
To save the people still inside the house, Aurelia must decide whether memory can be made strong enough to resist what has already begun to erase them.
The Dark Keeps Records is a Gothic supernatural horror novel about witness, winter, impossible warmth, and the people who refuse to let one another disappear.