The Blade Between: A Novel

Mysterious forces threaten a rapidly changing city in upstate New York in this frightening and uncanny ghost story by a Nebula Award winning author.“Like Clive Barker, Miller has a great talent for creating interesting characters and building up quiet dread. . . . Timely.” —San Francisco ChronicleA Library Journal Horror Best SellerRonan Szepessy promised himself he’d never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City’s distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge.Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom’s wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their historic town has become—overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable.Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real estate developers aren’t the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan’s hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.“As addictive and brutal as it is smart and challenging.” —Paul Tremblay“An explosive narrative about a small town caught between the decaying ghosts of the past, the shattered dreams and mediocre lives of its residents, and the monster of gentrification that threatens to erase it all.” —NPR

About the Author

Sam J. Miller is an author whose fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award, was long-listed for the Hugo Award, and has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the Andre Norton Award. He is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion Writers Workshop. He lives in New York City now, but grew up in a middle-of-nowhere town in upstate New York. He is the last in a long line of butchers. In no particular order, he has also been a film critic, a grocery bagger, a secretary, a painters assistant and model, and the guitarist in a punk rock band. His husband of fifteen years is a nurse practitioner and way smarter and handsomer than Sam is.

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