The Hospitality
A Gothic Horror Novella
Available everywhere — ebook, paperback and audiobook
They come to dinner. They have come to dinner for three hundred years.
The Lambert family has hosted Edmund and Hester Harrison every Saturday evening for twenty-six years. The candles are lit at seven. The roast is served at quarter past. No one has ever cancelled. No one has ever been late. And no one — not Robert, not his wife Ruth, who sets the table with hands that no longer quite belong to her — can remember what the Harrisons look like.
When Samuel Lambert returns home after three years away, he expects the usual strained silence and the usual impeccable Saturday. What he doesn't expect is the gap in his own memory: a lifetime of dinners with guests he cannot picture, cannot name, cannot draw. A locked door in the east wing. A sixth place set at the table for no one. And the family ledger that records, in the same red ink, every Saturday since 1693 — the year an Edmund Lambert bought this land and built this house.
The closer Samuel looks, the more wrong everything becomes. His mother is unravelling under a courtesy she has carried alone for decades. His father has chosen, deliberately, not to know. And the guests — patient, polite, three centuries patient — are no longer interested in waiting.
Some debts are inherited. Some appetites never end. And some houses have been keeping their bargain for longer than anyone alive can remember.
★★★★★ Reedsy Discovery Must Read
A literary gothic horror novella about courtesy, complicity, and the things we feed to the people we invite in. For readers of Shirley Jackson, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Sarah Waters.
- Length
- 141 pages
- Published
- 20 January 2026
- Genre
- Folk gothic horror