Okay.

And, uh, at that time I was just kind of in this like crazy manic writing mode where I was putting up a new short story or part of a series every two or three days, something like two or 3000 words, um, every two or three days.

And, uh, yeah, I just kind of like popped out the first story and, uh, and then people really, really liked it.

And I had a ton of, you know, it was kind of this kind of viral moment where a lot of people were giving up votes and, um, it was getting a lot of attention.

So then I started, I realized I had sort of a lot of other ideas about this house.

And so the first story turned into two, then three and four, five, six, seven.

And, um, And then, yeah.

So you, when you were initially writing it, you never really had any, there wasn't really an intention for it to become a novel or for it to kind of all get put together.

And I mean, I wonder how much of this book was planned out in advance and how much did you pants or did you write organically? This

is probably the only book that is written in the way it was written.

Basically, like I said, I was on Reddit.

I was posting stories every two days, uh, posted the first installment of this series, which I think the, in the very first story, it was just, uh, I think Claire realizes she has this house and then ends up, uh, erasing a child's death.

And it is a pretty like brutal decision to have to do this, but she does it because she's like wanting to save someone she cares about who loved the child.

So it was originally, that was just like a little one-off story, but it was like really popular.

And I was like, oh, I'll do a sequel.

So I wanted to clarify, did you have your agent beforehand or did your agent pick you up via seeing your Reddit

Before we actually get into the meat of the novel, could you tell our listeners what is the novel about?

Okay, yeah.

So a kind of Silicon Valley couple, Tom and Claire, they've been living in San Francisco for a long time.

But for various reasons, it's gotten a little too rough for them.

And they decided to buy this nice big house down in the peninsula, which is kind of where...

You know, like all the top Google and Facebook execs live.

And they find this old Queen Anne that really kind of pulls them in for reasons they can't even quite put a name to.

And I don't know if there's a question in here, but I just I did want to ask you, were those themes of control and stability and really trying desperately to hold on to normalcy? Were they paramount? Were they like front of mind as you were writing the novel or did they develop as the work was in progress? Yeah.

It started out as a short story, didn't it?

Yeah.

So this actually started out as a series of short stories on a website called Reddit, on a subreddit called No Sleep.

And it's kind of a spot where people post spooky stories that they claim are true, and, uh, I was there just posting bunches and bunches of scary stories.

I, I was writing, you know, one almost every other day, and I think The House That Eats the Dead was the 48th story I posted there.

And, uh, it kinda caught fire on the internet, and, uh, a bunch of people liked it, and my, my now agent, Maria Brannan, reached out and said, "Hey, maybe we could turn this one into a novel." And, uh, so we did.

Set up the story for us, please.

Ooh, yes.