The Man in Black comes out tomorrow! Here’s an excerpt

I am so excited to be publishing my 8th novel, The Man in Black, tomorrow. I had the idea for this back in July, I think, when I started reading House of Leaves and wanted to write a haunted house book. Marrying my love of gothic literature with the tropes of the romance genre was a bit of a challenge at first, but I had a lot of fun and I think that really comes through in the book. The Man in Black is probably my favourite novel I’ve written so far.

Fans of gothic literature may notice that the title of the book – and some of the character and place names – are a homage to one of my favourite gothic novels: Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. Susan is a huge inspiration to me and it was nice to be able to add that little nod to her work.

In case you were wondering what the book is about, here’s the blurb:

Love so fierce it transcends even death.

When Elinor Baxtor arrives at the dilapidated Marshell House to settle the estate of her law firm’s oldest client, she can’t help but feel a little spooked. The creaking gothic mansion is a far cry from her life as an adventurous party girl back in London. 

Then she meets Eric Marshell, a man dressed entirely in black with a wicked smile and the ability to float through walls. Eric was the violinist in popular rock band Ghost Symphony until a hit-and-run accident claimed his life. Now he’s trapped inside his mother’s house for all eternity, and the only one who can see or hear him is Elinor. 

Eric and Elinor fight their attraction for each other as they dig into the mystery of Eric’s death. But when they uncover a dark and sinister plot that threatens Elinor’s life, their bond draws them into a world neither of them understands. Can their love transcend the boundary between life and death? 

The Man in Black is a steamy gothic romance set in the English village of Crookshollow. It’s a standalone novel of love, redemption, and second chances. If you love clever BBW heroines, crumbling gothic mansions, and brooding rockstars who know what they want, then this book will have you shivering all over.

Enjoy an excerpt from The Man in Black below, and order your copy now for a new release special of just $0.99!

(This text is copyright S C Green / Steffanie Holmes. Please ask permission before reprinting elsewhere)

PROLOGUE: ERIC

I woke up inside the floor.

That whole concept was weird. For starters, to say I woke up wasn’t quite accurate. I don’t really remember how my eyes came to be open, or indeed what had closed them in the first place. My consciousness seemed to rise up from within me, like a diver emerging from the depths. I had been swimming in the murky water, and then, suddenly, I was exposed to the sunlight again.

But being inside the floor … that part was accurate. I could see beams running along either side of my head, and a giant horizontal void strung with glimmering spider webs. My body seemed to emanate light, for around me I could make out the scratches of rodents against the wood, and the electrical cables winding through the space, but deeper into the floor was all blackness.

The first thing I did was look down at my hands. As a musician, my hands meant everything to me. They were the instruments through which I channelled my thoughts and moods. They looked the same as always; long, strong fingers, the distinctive calluses around the pads marking me as a violinist. They might’ve been a little paler than usual, but nothing to be worried about.

Now that I knew my hands were OK, I had to figure where I was and how I’d managed to get stuck inside the floor. I took a deep breath, and fell.

I cried out as I dropped through the ceiling, flailing my arms to catch something, anything, to prevent me falling on my back and hurting myself. I watched the chandelier on the ceiling hurtling away from me as I plummeted through the air. Only I didn’t land. I fell right into the floor and kept going, passing through a basement, then plunging through a wooden floor into a crawl space, and finally into the dirt below. A worm crawled in front of my face.

And that was when panic seized me. Is the house falling down? Was it an earthquake? How had I ended up down here? I opened my mouth to scream, but then clamped it shut again, realising that I’d just fill it with dirt, and then I wouldn’t be able to breathe …

But I shouldn’t be able to breathe anyway. I’m buried in the dirt beneath a house. I should be suffocating.

The worm inched across my vision.

What is going on?

I tried to move my arms, and found it quite easy. I held my hands in front of me, watching the way the dirt fell through them, as if my hands weren’t really there at all. I waved my finger at the worm, and my finger passed right through its body. The worm continued its travels, oblivious to my presence.

This was no natural disaster. Something was seriously wrong with me.

I lifted my hands over my head, and as I did so, my body shot up again. My head popped out from the dirt, but before I could get a good look at the crawlspace, I found myself in the basement. I brought my hands down again, and that stopped my descent. My body still seemed to be emanating a slight glow, and I could see some of the objects piled around me. Old toys, stacks of books, a couple of microwaves. Boxes labelled with loopy handwriting. Something about the stuff looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it …

I pointed my hands toward the basement steps, and, without moving my feet, I flew toward them. But instead of hitting the wooden stairs, I flew through them, feeling only a faint tingle in my limbs as I passed through the solid staircase.

OK, so that explains why I’d fallen into the dirt. I didn’t seem to be able to touch anything anymore. I needed to get to a hospital, maybe they had a pill to fix translucency. I stretched one arm out in front of me, and used it a bit like a conductor’s to direct my hovering body. I floated up the staircase, flew through the door, and ended up in a very familiar kitchen.

Dark oak benches, grey marble tops, delicate china cups lined up in the dresser, a collection of ceramic cats crowding the windowsill. I’d recognise those cats anywhere. I’m in my mother’s house. That was why it felt so familiar, despite the strangeness with my body. And now I was levitating in my mother’s kitchen. I floated over the counter and sat near the chandelier, gazing down at the old-fashioned gas-fired stove that she’d used to over boil every vegetable until it ceased to be anything but an unpalatable brown goo. I’d never seen a kitchen from this angle before. It looked strange, otherworldly, like the deck of a spacecraft.

From my vantage point, I noticed several strange things. I noticed that the ceramic cat collection my mother kept on the windowsill was out of order. My mother was very particular about those sorts of things, so the fact that the orange cat was not next to its mate and the striped cat was on the end instead of being near the middle was a little disturbing.

I also noticed the body on the floor.

It was a woman, wearing a floral dress and frilled apron. A cupboard was open beside her, and a wheelchair was on the floor behind her, tipped on its side. She’d bent down to get something – a cupboard was open – and hadn’t got up again. The woman lay sprawled on her back, her face staring up at me, double-chin held proudly aloft, eyes wide and unblinking, skin a strange mottled colour.

It was my mother, and she was dead.

I knew I should feel some emotion, some sense of sadness or loss at discovering her demise, but I did not. I felt oddly detached from the whole situation, as if I were watching a movie, instead of something in real life.

My mother is dead.

She’d been a bitter and hard woman, and had shown little love toward me. “You’re just like your father, a useless dreamer!” she would scream at me when I came home from my music lessons. I’d left her as soon as I was old enough to live on my own, and I only came to visit her only out of obligation. In recent years she’d developed Alzheimer’s, and oddly, the disease had actually bought us closer. She seemed convinced I was a seven-year-old boy again, and that Dad would be home any moment. She couldn’t seem to remember that in her eyes, I was the spawn of my father; the ungrateful, lazy folk musician who’d left us twenty years ago. Instead, she wanted to bake cookies and play soldiers with me.

But now she was dead.

A woman dressed in a nurse’s whites bent over the body, her eyes wide with fear and shock. She reached down and lifted up my mother’s wrist, pressing her fingers against the skin to feel for a pulse. “Oh, no, oh no,” she kept mumbling as she tried to puff air into my mother’s lungs. But it was no use. The nurse’s saliva dripped onto my mother’s floral dress.

The nurse looked up, straight up at me. Our eyes met for a moment, and then she looked away, completely oblivious to my hovering presence. She reached for the phone on the wall and dialled a number, her tone businesslike as she described the scene to the person on the other end.

She hadn’t seen me. I was floating right above her, and she’d looked straight at me and hadn’t seen me. I was a student of the macabre, a gothic rock musician. I knew what that meant.

I was dead, too. But now I was a ghost, a floating, see-through ghost. And of all the places I could’ve chosen to haunt, I’d ended up in my mother’s house.

ELINOR

The train rattled through the countryside, hurtling past rolling hills and fluffy sheep that leapt back from the tracks in terror, like little clouds scurrying across the landscape. I stared out the window, my lips stretched in an epic pout that glared back at me in my reflection, while my fingers tapped out an angry text message.

I can’t believe I have to go to hicksville for two whole weeks.

No parties, no raves, no cocktails. Did they even have a pub in Crookshollow? How was I going to get through two weeks without setting foot inside a pub?

Just because I’m the only one who doesn’t have a spouse, or kids, or a pet helicopter that needs walking, they chose to send me away. What about my life? What about my commitments? I had tickets to the biggest house party of the year, and instead of shaking my arse on the floor with Cindy, I’m going to be plonking it on some dead lady’s sofa. No thank you.

And worst of all, my banishment to hicksville couldn’t have come at a worse time. This was the crucial weekend for Operation Shag Damon. I had finally been making progress with Damon Sputnik, the spunky Russian DJ who was lighting up the London dance scene right now. I had been in love with Damon ever since I first saw him behind the decks, his shaved head bobbing along with the beat, his thick muscles bulging from beneath his fluorescent vest. I even had a poster of him at home, his shirtless body decorated with a prowling tiger tattoo. I had such a weakness for tattooed men. I kept the poster on the inside door of my closet so that, on the slim chance I ever did get lucky with Damon and brought him back to my place, he wouldn’t see it and think I was some kind of crazy stalker. That, and my landlord didn’t want anything hung on the walls.

The truth is, I’d never in a million years have gone after a guy like Damon, but after things ended with my last boyfriend Joel, I hadn’t exactly been putting myself out there the way a single nearly-30 gal should. So my pal Cindy has been pushing me to get off my arse (and to stop feeding it Wagon Wheels and Hobnobs, but that’s another story) and go after someone. So of course I walked straight into a club and fell for Damon, the most unattainable guy I could possibly have chosen.

Over the last six months, most of my weekends had been occupied with getting Damon to notice me. It had become a kind of project for me, and like everything else in my life I attacked it with all the determination and cunning I could muster. I bought him drinks. I stood right down the front when he did his DJ sets. I was always the first person to like his social media posts. On Cindy’s advice, I got some special contact lenses for clubbing so I could leave my glasses at home, and I squeezed my not-unsubstantial arse into tiny skirts and hot pants in an attempt to lure him with the promise of flesh. I’d even offered to hand out flyers for his parties at other events, which earned me a lifetime ban from Vortex and The Crib down in Chelsea. Apparently handing out flyers for a competing gig was frowned upon in the scene. Now I knew.

Despite Operation Shag Damon moving at a rollicking pace, Damon barely seemed to register my existence. I couldn’t find any shorter skirts on the high street, so apart from abandoning clothing altogether and just waddling around naked, I was running out of ideas. I was just starting to give up hope, and then last weekend happened.

Last weekend. The thought of it still made me smile and my chest flutter with excitement. I’d been hanging out in my usual spot near the stage during Damon’s set. He finished spinning, and as he came off stage, he tossed me his sweaty towel. I caught it and draped it over my shoulder, and he’d grinned and grabbed me, pulling my body hard against his, and shoved his tongue down my throat.

Our passionate snogging session in front of a blaring speaker stack definitely stood out as one of the highlights of my life. But I’m pretty sure Damon was so blazed it was unlikely he even remembered my name, or the piece of paper with my number on that I’d shoved into the pocket of his jeans. He certainly hadn’t called it.

That was why going to this weekend’s party was so important—I had to make him fall for me before he got distracted by another, thinner, more-interesting girl.—

But of course I couldn’t tell Clyde any of this. As far as my boss was concerned, I was just a plump, mousy junior lawyer who ate takeout every day for lunch and didn’t look like a supermodel squeezed into a size-0 Marc Jacobs suit. And that was exactly why Clyde called me into his office after lunch today. “Baxter!” he barked, tossing a thick file across his desk. “Do you listen to the news?”

“What news?”

“The news, you know. The news news. The shit that happens in the world outside of this firm.”

I didn’t miss a beat. “Nothing much of interest happens outside this firm, sir.”

“Atta girl,” Clyde said in his most condescending tone. “Anyway, it seems that another celebrity death hit the headlines this week. That famous violinist, Eric Marshell, was killed in a car accident.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” I didn’t pay much attention to the music world outside of the London club scene, but even I’d heard of Eric Marshell, the dashing rock violinist with his black jeans and leather jacket and smouldering good looks who was single-handedly making classical music cool again. “Were you a fan?”

Clyde snorted. “My wife was. She went to his show in London last week with all her girlfriends. She even has a poster of him hanging on the wall above our bed. Imagine fucking your wife while that man’s gargantuan face stares down at you?”

“That’s …” I couldn’t find an appropriate adjective. I was too busy trying to mentally block out the image of my boss going at it with his wife.

“Well, shit happens, whether you hear about it or not. So, Marshell’s dead, but that’s of little concern to me. What is of concern to me is the fact that his elderly mother, Alice Marshell, was found in her house, dead from a heart attack not long after her son’s untimely demise. It looks as if the son was actually on the way to see her when his car went off the road.”

“That’s interesting.” It wasn’t, but I wasn’t sure what I was expected to say.

“It is to you.” Clyde tossed a thin black file across the desk. “Alice Marshell is a client of ours, with quite substantial holdings. Most of her files are from before we went fully online with the system, so it’s a bit of a paperwork nightmare. Eric was her only child, and there’s no husband or other family named in the will, so with Eric gone, dividing up her assets suddenly got a lot more complicated. Unfortunately, she’s been infirm for the last five years, and we have very little of her relevant paperwork here. Someone will have to go down to her home right away and put everything in order before the usual bloodsucking relatives start to swoop in. And I’ve decided that someone is you.”

“Me?” Inwardly, I groaned. Occasionally, in situations like this, the firm needed to send a lawyer out to a client’s home to go through their paperwork and execute the will. Most of our clients were older, and sometimes they had no one left by the time they passed on, so it was our job to figure out what they had, sell off what assets needed to be sold, and place the money where it needed to go. Everyone who’d done it hated it, and usually fobbed it off onto a junior lawyer. As an intern I’d done one such sojourn two years ago, for a dead duke on the Isle of Skye. I’d snuck up Joel, and we polished off the old duke’s wine cellar and had wild sex in the hunting room. But this time around I had no boyfriend and no desire whatsoever to leave London for whatever shithole this old lady lived in.

“Of course I mean you.” Clyde stared at me, nudging the file closer to me with his pudgy fingers. “You’re the only person available to leave today. The senior lawyers all have families, Bob is entertaining clients on his yacht, and Lila has plans all weekend that can’t be cancelled.”

Of course she does, I thought. She has plans to fuck your brains out while your wife is at the opera. Clyde Greyson was a notorious womaniser—he’d slept with most of the women in the office, many of them in the office. I had to be careful opening up supply closets in case I accidentally saw something I couldn’t unsee. But Clyde had never once approached me with the offer to visit a supply closet. Privately, he’d told Lila that “chubby girls” weren’t his type—a slip the bitch had been delighted to spread all over the office when she came back from their most recent weekend dalliance.

If I had a boyfriend or a kid or a size-0 arse, this wouldn’t be happening to me. I racked my brain for an excuse, any possible reason I couldn’t go. “But sir … I have tickets to an event this weekend, and … I have to feed my cat … and um, water my peace lily, and my parents are coming down from Leeds, and—”

“I play golf with your father, remember? Your parents live in Chelsea.”

Damn. “Right, yes, of course. But I do have these tickets for a party—I mean, an opera on Saturday. I can’t go to Crookshollow, wherever that is—”

“It’s only a few hours from London on the train. It’s a lovely little village, the wife and I went for a weekend getaway once. They have a bit of a gimmick with having burned the most witches in England. It’s Halloween there all year round. You’ll love it.”

“It’s sounds delightful,” I said, in a voice that implied it sounded anything but.

“You’ll only be gone a couple of weeks, and of course we’ll reimburse you all your expenses and these opera tickets of yours. Look at it as a holiday in the country.”

I hate the country, I thought, but didn’t say. I had a lot of thoughts in the offices of Greyson, Smithe & Hanley that I didn’t say, mostly because apart from the people I worked with, I actually liked my job, and didn’t want to lose it.

I’d always been kind of weirdly fascinated with death, and how different people deal with it. As a teenager this manifested in a weird goth phase where I read a lot of Poe, wore a lot of black lipstick, and basically frightened several years off my conservative lawyer parents’ lives. At university I gravitated more to estate law than criminal defence, which was what all the cool kids did. The way people divided up their estates said a lot about who they were in life, and what they considered important. In death and wills, the truth is always revealed.

But my interest did not extend to giving up the next two weeks of my life to living in the middle of nowhere while Damon Sputnik partied on without me. My heart sank as my exciting weekend of Operation Shag Damon dissipated before my eyes. I forced a smile, knowing there was no way I could get out of it. “Of course, sir.”

“Excellent. Go home and pack your things. Janice has already booked you a train. It leaves at four. Do a good job on this, Baxter, and there might be something in it for you.” Clyde winked. “Maybe even a something with its own office.”

An office. It was the dream of every junior lawyer to eventually move up the ranks and acquire one of the sought-after private spaces on the second floor. I’d been passed over twice for promotion—beat out by two obnoxious size 0s—and Clyde knew that I was itching to move up and prove to my father that I was successful. He knew that by dangling that carrot in front of me, he could count on my cooperation. The guy may have been pushing seventy, but he was still slick (he was a lawyer, after all).

And that was how I found myself slumped against a rattling window on a Friday evening, clutching the stub of my one-way train ticket to Crookshollow, nowheresville, Middlesex. Population: 11,056 people, 35,000 sheep.

Delightful.

My phone beeped. The businessman sitting across from me shuffled his paper and frowned. I pushed my black-rimmed glasses up my nose and glared right back. What do you expect, buddy? I don’t have a carrier pigeon in my Kate Spade bag ready to fly messages home to my friends. I pulled my phone out of my jacket and checked the message.

It was Cindy, texting to see if we were still on for club-hopping tonight. Cindy and I had been friends since our university days. We’d met at the student pub. I’d been stood up on a date and she’d been dumped by her boyfriend, and we bonded over our mutual heartaches and several G&Ts. Our friendship was mutually beneficial: I helped her study and pass her exams, she introduced me to the London underground club scene and the excitement of picking up random strangers from the dance floor.

Now I worked at the law firm, and Cindy was in advertising, but we still danced every weekend like we had in college. Cindy had just heard about a rave going down at an abandoned warehouse in Camden. Damon’s going to be there. My stomach churned with jealousy as I texted back to say I couldn’t come, and that I wouldn’t be going to Damon’s party on Saturday, either.

I knew that, at age 29, I was probably too old for clubbing, but after 60-plus-hour weeks pushing paper around my desk and sucking up to Clyde so he wouldn’t overlook me for advancement for another year, I needed to let my hair down and go a little crazy. And a club—with its pounding music and wild lights —was the perfect antidote. I could float in an ocean of bodies and be part of the group, part of the “in” crowd. It sure beat standing in the lunchroom by myself sipping coffee while all of the skinny associates giggled together in the corner.

Cindy texted back, Bummer! I’ll give Tanya your ticket and keep an eye on Damon for you. I’ll make sure his hands don’t wander.

I sighed, and replaced my phone in my pocket. I grabbed my bag out from under my seat and pulled out my sketchbook. I balanced it on my knees, frowning out the window at the lush, green landscape as I flipped open a page and doodled a gnarled, twisted tree, the roots knotted up, the way my stomach felt right now at the thought of what Damon might get up to this weekend without me. I added a snake curling around the trunk, wondering how the design would look as it wound its way up my spine.

I had decided to get a tattoo before my 30th birthday—an enormous piece that covered my back and maybe my shoulders, too. No one at work would need to know it was there—it wasn’t as if any of the male partners were clamouring to sleep with me—but in my party clothes it would stand out. It would mark me as special. And in a club full of perfect size 0s with perky breasts and stomachs full of E, Elinor the dull lawyer had to do something to stand out.

I’d always been a good artist, and had even thought about going to art school at one point. But my father—a high-profile defence attorney, and my mother—a law clerk—had drilled that dream right out of me. My parents would never approve of a tattoo. They didn’t think body art fit with the corporate image—the blank drone with perfectly coiffed hair that they saw as the only way to get ahead in life. When I was a kid, my teachers would hold up my drawings in class, but all my parents ever wanted to know was how my grades were. “Why are you doodling?” my mother would scold me. “Go and do something useful, like read a book or your homework.” “There’s a reason I’ve never met a rich artist.” My dad was fond of saying. “It’s a dead-end career, Elinor. Just work hard at school and forget about your little scribbles.”

Of course, even if I’d pointed out the hundreds of successful artists hanging in the Tate Modern, my dad never would have changed his mind. Instead, because I always wanted to please them, I hid my journals and tattoo magazines under my bed. I did my homework and got good grades and went to the same law school my father attended. I graduated with honours, and started my career in a prestigious London firm. But as I fumbled my way through law school, only half-interested in the work, I watched the art and drama students with envy as they raced around the campus with facial piercings, vintage clothes and beautiful tattoos, yelling “give me a location!” and looking so excited about the future. But of course, they were all probably living on the streets now, whereas I had a job at Greyson, Smithe & Hanley, a nice salary, and an apartment in trendy Camden that only housed a small population of cockroaches. I had even snogged Damon Sputnik. I didn’t have a right to complain about my life.

The tattoo was going to be my one concession to my creative side—my secret rebellion against my sensible, pre-planned life of law offices and beige clothing and boring men. But I was determined that I was going to draw the piece myself, and it had to be just right. My friend Tanya had recently hooked up with a tattoo artist and during a particularly drunken party convinced him to ink some cherry blossoms on her ribcage. They were nice enough, and considering the artist was off his face at the time, only a little crooked. I could have done better than that, I couldn’t help but think every time I saw those droopy blossoms.

But when it came to my own tattoo, I just couldn’t decide on what I wanted. My 30th birthday was fast approaching, and I’d have to make a decision soon. I’d filled an entire sketchbook with ideas, but nothing seemed right. Nothing was good enough, me enough, to be permanently etched into my skin.

Maybe nothing seems right because your body isn’t right, I thought to myself, my stomach churning with loathing. I hated the way I looked right now. I’d always been on the chubby side, but ever since I’d started working at the law firm, I had no time or energy for eating healthily. My gym membership card had sunk to the bottom of my bag, along with twenty Snickers wrappers and a dried up lipstick. I’d gained a couple of extra pounds, and every time I looked at myself in the mirror I heard my mother’s voice in my head, reminding me that fat girls didn’t attract good husbands.

So when I thought about actually having to take off my shirt and lie down in front of a hot, shirtless tattoo artist, (because in my head tattoo artists are always large, muscular, shirtless dudes) my stomach churned even harder. I was supposed to be two dress sizes smaller when I turned 30, but then, if I was two sizes smaller, maybe I wouldn’t need the tattoo.

At least I’ll have plenty of time to work on my drawings while I’m in Crookshollow, I thought, but the thought brought me no comfort. So instead I put my sketchpad away, jammed my iPod earbuds into my ears, and stared out the window, listening to Damon’s latest album and figuring out how I could rescue the situation. How should I play it when I see him again? Aloof and cool, or enthusiastic and flirty? What should I wear?

If only I didn’t have to go to Crookshollow. But it’s only two weeks, and then I’ll be back to my life like nothing had changed. Nothing can happen in two weeks, right?

You can order your copy of The Man in Black now on a new release special of just $0.99! Grab your copy now, and join my mailing list to get first notice of new books, deleted scenes, free swag, and other awesome stuff.