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Read an Excerpt From It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest
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Read an Excerpt From It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest
Ronnie doesn’t know it yet, but her fate rests in the hands of the dead.
By Cherie Priest
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Published on June 18, 2025
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from It Was Her House First, a new gothic horror novel by Cherie Priest, out from Poisoned Pen Press on July 22nd.
Silent film star Venita Rost’s malevolent spirit lurks spider-like in her cliffside mansion, a once-beautiful home that’s claimed countless unlucky souls. And she’s not alone. Snared in her terrible web, Inspector Bartholomew Sloan—her eternal nemesis—watches her wreak havoc in helpless horror, shackled by his own guilt and Venita’s unrelenting wrath.Now the house has yet another new owner. This time it’s Ronnie Mitchell, a grieving woman who buys the run-down place sight unseen. She arrives armed with an unexpected inheritance, a strong background in renovation, and a blissful ignorance regarding the house’s blood-soaked history. But her arrival has stirred up more than just dust and decay. In the shadows, unseen eyes watch. Then, a man comes knocking. He brings wild stories and a thinly veiled jealousy, as well as a secret connection to the house that can only lead to violence.Venita’s fury awakens, and a deadly game unfolds.Caught between a vengeful ghost and a ruthless living threat, Ronnie’s skepticism crumbles. The line between living and dead isn’t as sharp as it seems, and she realizes too late that in Venita’s house, survival might be just an illusion.
A note from the author:
I’m Cherie Priest and my father wanted boys—but that didn’t stop him from teaching me everything I wanted to know about fixing up old houses. So here’s a book for him, and a little bit of wish-fulfillment for the pair of us: a story about a grand old mansion so derelict that it can scarcely be saved at all, and a woman who gets a life-insurance policy that lets her buy it sight-unseen at auction. It’s a hot mess full of ghosts, but it’s my kind of hot mess full of ghosts, and I had a wonderful time being nerdy about old architecture and salvage. I hope you have an equally wonderful time reading it.
Bartholomew Sloan
1932
My dearest friend’s execution was largely a private affair, despite public interest in the condemned man and the mystery of his motives. It took place in less than twenty minutes on the lawn behind the courthouse—with a perfunctory prayer and a very small audience gathered before the gallows. Mostly the spectators were friends of the doomed man’s late wife, wearing hard expressions of righteous vindication, but a handful of others were in attendance as well: a court secretary in a crisp gray dress observed the proceedings; a reporter with a press badge tucked into his hatband took notes; and a tired-looking photographer snapped pictures with the too-bright, sizzling pop of a flashbulb.
The inevitable write-up in the newspaper was a real doozy, even though the judge had closed the scene to prevent the curious crowds from getting a morbid eyeful.
In the end, Oscar Amundson’s death was witnessed by fewer than a dozen people, and at the request of the man in the noose himself, I was one of them.
Oscar had begged me to attend. Obviously, I couldn’t say no to the man’s last wish, and I couldn’t look away when the trapdoor dropped and my friend dangled, feet bound together and swaying, heavy and limp, like a fortune teller’s pendulum.
At least it was quick. The hangman had tied the knot correctly, and the snap of Oscar’s neck had come a split second after the click of the floor’s release. A loud crack, a sharp twitch, and a brilliant, innocent man was lost to this world—leaving everything behind to me, for all that I didn’t deserve so much as a penny.
In the wake of that fresh, excruciatingly specific horror, I found myself at loose ends, with no idea at all what to do with myself.
I didn’t know what to do with Oscar’s estate or his money. I didn’t know what to do with Seattle. I didn’t know what to do with my hands as I stood in Oscar’s parlor. My fingers fluttered at my sides as if they were searching for something, and I suppose they were. I’m not sure what.
Everyone was dead except for me.
It was a cold comfort, indeed, knowing my reputation could survive the damage if I could survive my sorrow—and what choice did I have? Heaven only knew what greeted Oscar on the other side, but I had a horrible, if vague, idea of what would await me. It would be a fate far worse than mere grief or regret.
I was no longer a young man, but neither had I wandered too deeply into middle age. The silver in my hair was fresh and sparse, and the spread of my waistline had only cost a single notch on my favorite leather belt. With luck and clean living, I might have lasted another forty years. Another fifty, even. Why not? My grandfather lived to see a full century, plus a year and a half past that.
This was both a true story and a comforting fairy tale, one I repeated to myself at length, at night, when the gaslights were turned down to a hiss that was almost as soft as silence, and the curtains scarcely fluttered from a breeze that whispered through the night’s wee hours.
But fairy tales were of no use to me.
I’d made my bed, and in time I’d surely sleep in it.
But then, there, in the aftermath of Oscar’s death, I stood alone in the otherwise empty Amundson home. At the time, I believed this meant that I was officially the house’s sole survivor, since everyone else who’d ever lived or loved within it was gone—all three of them, taken in the span of a year.
Oscar, Venita, and Priscilla Amundson.
Oscar, lost to the gallows for the murder of his wife—the silent film star Venita Rost, who met her own tragic end at a rocky overlook… or perhaps at the bottom of the Sound, considering the coroner said she’d drowned after hitting her head on the boulders. She was likely unconscious when the final darkness took her.
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It Was Her House First
Cherie Priest
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It Was Her House First
Cherie Priest
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Small mercies, perhaps. For all that I would’ve liked to strangle her myself for what she did—and for what happened in the wake of it—I couldn’t begrudge her that solace at the end.
After all, we were dear friends once, and everything that became of her and her family was my fault—though for reasons vastly beyond my control, I could neither prove this fact nor change it. Likewise, I had utterly failed to prove the truth: that Venita had committed suicide and framed her husband, an innocent man now laid out on a slab somewhere, wearing nothing but a sheet and a toe tag.
But oh, how I’d tried.
I’d called in every favor, pressed every button, pulled every lever. I’d helped Oscar find a lawyer in Los Angeles who’d never lost a case in his life until the salacious end of the silver starlet, the “Platinum Pussycat,” in West Seattle. The solicitor had returned to California in a rage, his perfect record ruined.
He blames me; he might as well, and he can go to the back of the line.
Oscar’s loss was bad enough, but I wished to God that I could quit thinking about little Priscilla. She’d followed me around the house like a duckling every time I came to visit, and I loved her. I would have done anything for her. I would never have harmed her or allowed any harm to come to her.
But not everything is up to me.
The child was dead. She was the first small domino to fall, dragging her parents behind her with such terrible gravity.
I was so frustrated, so angry at myself for telling Venita to do her worst—though I never could have known how literally she’d take this challenge or how thoroughly she would rise to it. Rationally, I was aware of the perilous fury of a mother who’d lost a child; realistically, I could have never imagined her capacity for retribution.
She should’ve taken it out on me. Just me.
She should’ve left Oscar out of it. He’d been utterly blameless in his daughter’s death, blameless in his wife’s death, and blameless of anything except believing too much in a bad man who couldn’t help him.
If I’d possessed a second soul to sell, I would’ve pawned it in a heartbeat to spare Oscar. To spare any of them. All of them.
Starting with that child.
But I didn’t. I stood alone in the parlor, surrounded by beautiful things. A glorious round mirror with a gold frame, a marble bust of an esteemed ancestor, curtains made of chartreuse velvet that dripped and pooled across the floor. A rug imported from thousands of miles to the west, furniture carved with whorls and elegant feet shaped like the paws of lions.
There was a fireplace, ornate and sooty despite the regular cleaning. There was a bar cart, but it sat beneath the mirror, and I hated the mirror. I could not look at the mirror.
But I needed a drink. I kept my head down.
The crystal decanter was filled with amber-brown hooch, and the sparkling glasses beside it were covered with a fine layer of dust. The bottles on the bottom shelf were all Canadian; legal booze from the north always tended to be of better quality than the bathtub stuff you found downtown with a soft knock on a door and a password.
I crouched beside the cart and used the back of my hand to brush the dust from the labels. My preferred gin was not empty, for I was the only one who ever drank it—and I hadn’t been inside the Amundson house in months. No one had. After all the investigators (myself included) had finished combing the place for clues, it’d been locked up by order of the city police.
But now it belonged to me, and I wished with all my life that it didn’t.
It had been a mistake to accept Oscar’s overtures of friendship. It had been a terrible idea to become a regular guest, a friendly visitor beloved by him and his wife—to say nothing of my duckling: the dear Priscilla, whose demise I caused, if inadvertently.
After the child died, Oscar supported me and struggled to defend me against his wife’s wrath.
God, but she became a monster in the end, didn’t she? A living wraith, a raging poltergeist with a stained silk smock and bloodshot eyes. Always seething, never resting. Never relenting. Determined to burn down the whole world if that was what it took to punish the men who’d failed her so.
No, I was being unfair.
It was unfair of me to call her monstrous—the pot calling the kettle black, at bare minimum. Even after I’d finished two fingers of my favorite gin, I could see that much.
God, I hated that mirror.
I couldn’t help but stare at it anyway, taking in the gold frame, its lovely, delicate design circling the round sheet of glass. But I avoided my own face. I already knew that it was gray and sunken. I hadn’t slept through the night in weeks, and it showed in every sallow pore. I let my eyes trace the leaves, the feathers. The bits of moth or butterfly—which was it? Hard to tell. In my determination to avoid my own expression, my gaze fell to the bottom of the glass, where I spied a small series of smudges.
Dots. Fingerprints left behind by someone too small to reach any higher.
From some awful, guilty reflex, I flung my glass of gin at the mirror. The drink shattered there, but the mirror itself did not break—it only shuddered on the wall, and only dripped, and only dropped a piece of paper.
The paper was folded several times. It fluttered to the ground.
For a moment, I could not move. I could only glare at the note, which must have been stashed on the other side of the glass, affixed there with tape or twine. I could feel the dark-red flush rising up from my chest, creeping north of my collar, steaming the tips of my ears.
I couldn’t clearly see the handwriting that crossed the paper in tight blue lines, but I already knew who it belonged to.
I was torn between the dueling desires to either seize the note or flee the house and return to the East Coast as fast as modern technology could transport me there. It was easier instead to reach for another glass and pour another fat slug of gin, four fingers deep this time. I resolved to sip this one and make it last while watching the contents of the first glass drip down the mirror, over the frame, down the wall, and onto the floor.
Until my curiosity couldn’t stand it a moment longer.
When I picked up the folded paper, it was damp. It reeked of juniper and pine.
I took it to the nearest chair, an upholstered wingback with rolled arms and a high crest. It felt like sanctuary. It felt like support enough to unfold the note—carefully because it was so wet around the edges and folds, slowly because I knew who had written it. The sour acid in my stomach told me the contents would only make me miserable. I should have thrown it away. I should have left, locked the front door, and never returned.
But the handwriting was unmistakable.
Venita’s script was legendary. At one point, she’d even been called upon to paint the intertitles in the quiet black-and-white movies she’d once headlined. With a fine set of brushes and paint, she’d written her own name on the cards that called her a star, and there was even talk of creating a font based upon it, something to remember her by in perpetuity.
On the exterior of the folded sheet of paper, the letters running slightly, there it was: my own name.
For a moment, all sound was sucked out of the universe. The clock on the wall stopped clicking. The engine growls of a car rumbling past on the street evaporated. The horns of passing ships fell silent. The birds in the trees lost their place and stopped their singing. A faint, high-pitched whine of static replaced them in my ears.
I could hear nothing else—even the scrape of my fingers or the crinkle of the paper where it remained dry.
First, another drink. A big one. Almost enough to empty the glass. It took me three swallows, one after the other, and each one burned harder on the way down than the one before it.
Thusly fortified, and with my heart perched in my searing throat, I read the short, terrible message from a woman who’d been dead for months.
Dear Mr. Sloan,If you were half the detective the world pretends, you would’ve found this by now—but we both know you’re more coward than investigator. You killed my child. We both know that, too. I don’t know how, and I don’t expect to understand it. I don’t know why, and I shall likely never grasp that, either. But you and I, we know what you are. If Oscar had only believed me, or if he could have seen you as clearly as I do, perhaps he’d be the one holding this letter right now, before a roaring fire, having found it while moving furniture or in the course of an earthquake that rattles the walls and shakes all the small things loose. I might have forgotten it, after I changed my mind about what I must surely do next.Maybe he and I would be peacefully drinking in front of the radio, having freshly returned from a movie or a play. We might even have a second child by now—not a replacement for my Priscilla, for such a thing does not, could not, will not exist. But someone new, to mark a fresh beginning. I’m not so old that it’s outside the realm of possibility. We could’ve built something new, if only you’d had the decency to turn yourself in, confess your crimes, and accept your punishment.For that matter, if you’d only been content to leave us be! If you could’ve removed yourself from our presence and returned to whatever filthy haunts will have you in New York.But no. You did this. You chose this.
A flush crept up my neck, swallowed my ears, and turned my cheeks into bright-pink flares of fire. It crawled farther, up my nose, past my forehead. I felt each individual hair on my head reacting to the words, smeared but legible. My chest tightened. My breathing went shallow.
Here’s my confession, should you ever find it: We must assume if you’re reading this that I am dead and gone, and Oscar is to swing for my murder. That’s the plan, at least. I can’t live with a man who’d choose his lying bastard of a friend above his wife, even in the throes of our shared grief. I can’t let him disbelieve me, ignore my concerns, and stay so cozy with someone who has done so much harm to our family.Here’s the challenge, then. If you find this letter before the courts see fit to condemn him, so be it. The world is right, and you’re the remarkable genius everyone claims you to be. If not, then here’s the truth: I will make sure that people are watching when we go to the overlook. I will see to it that we are witnessed when I cry and fling myself onto the rocks. I will leave him to his fate, as he left me to my sorrow. And here’s a secret to accompany this confession: I never liked that gin. We only kept it in the house for you. No one else ever drinks it.Goodbye, Bartholomew Sloan. I’ll see you in hell.
The paper slipped from my hand. I didn’t mean to release it. It was between my fingers, and my fingers opened and it fell into my lap. My eyes weren’t focusing very well. Everything appeared in doubles. Triples.
I had to close them.
Somehow, I could still see it, the letter atop my legs. The handwriting I knew so well, I had seen on a movie screen, read in a confession, in a threat, in a letter stashed behind a mirror that I was too frightened to touch, in a house where everyone died eventually, and it was no one’s fault but my own. The last thought that rattled through my head before the poison took its final hold was short, and simple, and the purest truth I’ve ever recognized.
I did this.
Ronnie
Now
When me and Kate got out of the car, the trustee agent was already waiting for us on the front porch. He was jumpy and impatient, then visibly relieved to see us. I didn’t know why. We weren’t late.
“Veronica Mitchell?”
I gave him a little wave. “That’s me.”
“You brought a friend,” he observed. “Good.”
Kate said, “Uh…?” but he didn’t elaborate. He only stood there, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. I had a feeling if I clapped my hands real loud, he’d panic and bolt, so I didn’t do that. I just smiled like this was all perfectly normal. Buying a place like this, sight unseen, was surely a sane and reasonable thing for anyone to do.
I climbed the stairs to the house on the side of the ridge, and Kate tagged along a couple of steps behind me. The agent greeted us quickly and with brevity. A hasty handshake for me, a head-nod for my companion. “I’m Jeff Gaines, it’s a pleasure, let’s get this started.” He unlocked the door, shoving it ajar.
“You got a hot date or something?” Kate asked him.
“What?”
I said, “You seem to be in a bit of a rush.”
He shuddered in our general direction and declared, “It’s nothing personal, but I’ve always hated this place.” Then he took a deep breath and strolled stiffly inside without us, obviously expecting us to follow him. We held back.
Kate looked at me. I looked at Kate.
She said, “Rude.”
I shrugged. “I told you, the house has a history.”
From inside the house, Jeff called anxiously, “Are you coming?”
“Right behind you,” I called back.
“Chickenshit,” Kate muttered. “Him, not you. You’re the maniac who bought the place, much as it blows my mind, considering.” She slipped past me and disappeared into the foyer. “What happened to the woman who couldn’t live with a crack in the driveway? A blown-out light bulb? A crooked cabinet door?”
I almost said, “She died in the fire,” but that wasn’t true. It would’ve only upset her.
I hesitated on the porch.
It wasn’t a huge porch, but it was large enough for a little bit of outdoor furniture, maybe a nice swing. The beadboard overhead was covered in peeling paint and spiderwebs; the columns that supported it all were squared off, not quite in the Craftsman style but leaving behind a slender, more fluid nouveau influence.
The place had been built by someone with means, any fool could see it. Every detail whispered money: the fish scale siding that offset the round windows in the attic; the enormous entrance—a huge carved door with dentil molding and a tarnished thumbscrew dead bolt; hell, the size of the place alone was enough to make a flush and flashy statement. If you included the unfinished basement, it was more than five thousand square feet of rotting vintage living space.
And it was all mine. My home. My project. My problem.
Inside, I heard Kate ask Jeff, “Why do you hate this house? It’s… lovely.”
Something about the way she said “lovely” worried me, so I quit standing there, marveling at my overwhelming impulse purchase, and headed inside for the first time. That’s how it goes when you buy a place at auction because the owner is dead and the bank lets you have it for cheap. You roll the dice, and you take your chances.
The foyer was enormous and dark. It smelled like mildew and wet sawdust, fried knob and tube, and wood that had long ago rotted to black mulch. At the back of my sinuses, I detected something else, something dark and sweet and very gross, but I kept it to myself.
I tried to be optimistic. “Once I take all the boards off the windows… get a little light in here, it’ll be a really beautiful space. Look at these high ceilings—and that’s good quality woodwork around the stairs.”
Jeff dropped a set of keys with a clattering thump; they landed on a round table that was covered with a drape. “I’m glad you like it, because the house and everything in it belongs to you as is, with all its mold, asbestos, and, and… everything else…” He petered out.
“It’s cool,” Kate said with a feeble thrust of optimism.
“Yeah, it is. It’ll be a lot of work, but I’m down for it. Even if it takes me a lifetime.”
“Oh God, don’t put it that way.” Jeff took an envelope out from under his armpit, and he held it by the bottom corners to shake out some paperwork.
“Why not?” I wanted to know.
“A guy died here, you know that. We had to disclose it with the listing. You signed off on it,” he added, finding and waving the piece of paper that had warned me yes, a man had died there. In the middle of a too-hot summer the year before, in a hundred-year-old house with no air-conditioning. He’d decomposed straight through the second floor.
“Yeah, I knew.” I nodded idly while I looked around and tried not to think about how much work it’d be to repair.
But that smell. Faint and distinct, very close. Maybe I only picked it up because I knew it was there. Maybe some rat or raccoon had crawled into the place and died since the human being had liquified and soaked and ruined…what was this, three-quarter-inch white oak flooring?
A crinkle around the edge of Jeff’s nostrils implied that he could smell it, too. “Dead bodies don’t bother you?”
“Have you checked out the Seattle real estate market lately? Everything under a million bucks is a tear-down. That flipper’s dead body is the only reason I could afford the place.”
“They should’ve torn it down years ago.” He fished around for a specific piece of paper, some final thing that needed one last signature.
“That’s just crazy talk,” Kate told him.
Jeff looked up, his face a wild blend of earnest and demented. “Oh? You think so? Did either of you even google the address before you put in the offer? Did you do any due diligence?”
I was only half listening to him. I was staring around at a lovely historic house with a grand entryway and sweeping staircase, never mind the boarded windows and drop cloths on the furniture. So what if the wallpaper was peeling down in sheets and the ceiling drooped. It had potential. Right? Good bones and all that.
“Well?” Something in Jeff’s voice startled me. I looked up, and he asked again, “Did you look the place up before you put in your bid?”
“No,” I admitted. “I saw the picture and the price estimate on the foreclosures list. But I did look it up after the bid was accepted. That’s how I found out about the guy who died last year. Before you gave me the paperwork.”
He snorted. “Hugh Crawford, that’s the one you read about. The flipper, right?”
“Right. He bought it from the city, I think? No one was paying taxes on the place, something like that.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t even do a basic internet search first… Jesus. Well, it’s your funeral.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on.”
He picked up the keys from the table and slapped them into my palm before I was ready. They were cold and sharp, and they stung. “I grew up in this neighborhood, a few blocks south of here,” he said with a half-assed wave in a direction that may or may not have indicated the south end of the peninsula. “Everybody knew about this place. Everybody. That’s why it sat on the market so long—nobody local wanted to buy it. That’s how I knew you were from out of town.”
Kate was wandering off while he rambled, running her fingers across the covered furniture, fiddling with the pocket door hardware, tweaking the round light switches that clicked but didn’t turn on any lights. I watched her out of the corner of my eye.
“I’ve lived here awhile, but no, I didn’t grow up around here,” I informed him. “So do your worst. Tell me a ghost story, I dare you.”
He rose to the challenge. It gave him something to do with his nervous energy, and I could respect that. I was always looking for something to do with my own anxiety. Most recently, I’d bought it a decrepit old house to fixate on.
“Fine,” he said, as firm and loud as a gunshot. “Hugh Crawford wasn’t the first person to die here; he was just the most recent. The first one was a little girl back in the 1930s. She died in the parlor.”
I said, “Awe,” on principle.
“Where’s the parlor?” Kate asked.
Jeff didn’t respond. I assume he didn’t know.
I shrugged on his behalf. “It’s gotta be around here somewhere. Maybe that way, or that way.” I pointed to the big open rooms on either side of the foyer.
“Technically, her mother didn’t die here in the house,” he continued. “She died on the back side of the property, at the overlook. Her husband murdered her, threw her right over the side. There were witnesses and everything. Then her husband was executed for her murder.”
I said, “That sounds like two people who died nearby, and only one other person who died in the house. The kid, right? The other two… I mean, they didn’t execute the guy here on the premises. That happened someplace else.”
“Probably,” he admitted with a glum sigh that suggested he agreed but he didn’t know the details. Then he brightened morbidly. “But… since there wasn’t any family left, the husband’s best friend got the house, and he died here, too. Actually here, inside the house. Suicide, that’s how I heard it.”
I wasn’t delighted to hear this, but it didn’t exactly crush my spirit, either. “You said the girl died in the thirties; so when did the rest of these people die? It can’t have been recently.”
More sulking from Jeff. “No. It all happened back when the house was fairly new. Nobody’s lived in it very long since then. Nobody likes the… the energy,” he concluded. Then he changed his mind and kept going. “With no climate control and almost a hundred years of northwest winters? It’s a wonder the place is still standing.”
“Well, it is,” I said.
I hoped it was the kind of firm declaration that told him we were done here, and I wasn’t afraid of this particular house or these potential ghosts. I’d spent a childhood dreaming of a place like this, plotting with my baby brother—entertaining him with drawings of secret rooms and hidden stairs. Then, as adults, we’d started looking for a place to fix up, this time with grown-up plans for restoration and salvaged upgrades. But that was before what happened… happened.
Now it was just me. Or me and Kate, I guess. I love her like a sister, but it isn’t the same.
Jeff sighed loudly. “My point is, everybody who ever lived here died.”
I snorted. “If you take the long view, everyone who ever lives anywhere dies. I’m going to fix up this house; then I’ll have an incredible home. Thanks for dying, Mr. Crawford. And thanks for your time, Jeff.”
Thrilled to be excused, he exhaled with relief and patted the envelope’s contents on the table. “Great, I’m outta here.” He took a few steps toward the door and then paused, turning on his heel and stopping long enough to say, “I do think you should google it, though. Not just the house. Run a search for a woman named Venita Rost. They called her ‘the Platinum Pussycat.’ That’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
“Venita Rost,” I dutifully repeated. “I’ll do that. Later.”
Then he was gone, yanking the door shut behind himself.
Excerpted from It Was Her House First, copyright © 2025 by Cherie Priest.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>It Was Her House First</i> by Cherie Priest appeared first on Reactor.
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