Beneath the Stairs

DEBUT NOVEL Fawcett’s debut novel features protagonist Clare, who has seen her fair share of recent tragedy, having lost her first child to miscarriage and then lost her marriage as a result. When Clare’s childhood friend Abby attempts suicide in the supposedly cursed Octagon House in the town where they grew up, Clare must return to the beginning of a series of events that unfolded nearly 20 years ago. Haunted by guilt and grief, Clare comes face to face with the ghosts of her past. Those ghosts—whether or not they are in fact real, or figments of Clare’s teenage imagination, or products of Abby’s mental illness—are undeniably difficult to deconstruct. This novel reminds readers how easily a thought becomes a truth, how quickly a dream becomes a nightmare, and how unknowingly we ourselves can become haunted houses. The first-person narration by a cast of characters at times makes it feel more like a series of stage monologues, which is understandable since Fawcett is a renowned playwright (among her works is Atlas of Mud, winner of a Kennedy Center National Science Playwriting Award).