This Human Shape

Dunmore, New Hampshire, 1988. Diane Hayward wants one thing: quiet. Following an amicable divorce, she moves to an isolated town to start over as a schoolteacher—looking forward to a house where no one tells her what temperature the thermostat should be. But as autumn deepens, something shifts beneath the canopy of the dense eastern woods. Soon after, a stranger appears. He is tall, dark-haired, and quiet. While Diane finds his rigid habits peculiar, he doesn't feel threatening. Even as her neighbor begins tracking the man's strange behavior in a notebook—noticing how he stands motionless for hours and barely blinks—Diane is drawn into his orbit. He exudes a cold, hypnotic pull, and the closer she gets, the less she wants to look away. As animals are leaving the forest and people silently vanish into the woods, Diane avoids connecting the dots. Trapped between the town's growing unease and her own deep fascination, she remains unaware that her quiet life is already fracturing. A slow-burning science fiction horror novel in the tradition of Under the Skin and Annihilation.