Winter 1984. On the Iron Range of Minnesota, the small mining town of Marrow is emptying out. The mine has closed, families load their lives into pickups under cover of night, and the company's countdown has begun: evacuate before December 31.
But those who announce they're leaving die, one by one. Each death dressed up as an accident, each victim caught mid-flight. The sheriff files the reports away, the town keeps its silence, and an unspoken rule settles over Marrow: you can die here ? but you don't leave.
Rae Aho, twenty-eight, a Cook County?trained mortician, returns after eleven years to get her dying father out of the town that is finishing dying around him. She sees what the others refuse to see. On the bodies she prepares, impossible traces. Rock dust beneath the fingernails of an office worker. Circular bruises around the wrists of a man found beneath the ice. A pattern that cannot be coincidence.
What is killing Marrow does not come from elsewhere. What is killing Marrow lives beneath its feet ? in the miles of sealed tunnels no current survey has ever mapped, in the muffled knocks the town has heard every night for thirteen years without daring to name them.
An atmospheric horror novel, taut as an eighties slasher and cold as a Minnesota winter, where the setting is a character in its own right and every page draws closer to a truth the town has kept buried for thirteen years.
