Blackfen - Cami Drake

Blackfen follows Maren Calloway, a photo restorer with an unusual gift: she can feel the emotional residue left in objects and places - grief, love, longing - as tangibly as physical sensation. Exhausted by years of absorbing the emotional noise of city life, she relocates to Blackfen, a small, weathered coastal town, hoping for quieter surroundings.

The novel opens as she finishes restoring a wartime family photograph, feeling the long-buried grief of the woman who owned it, before packing up and taking a February ferry to her new home. In Blackfen, she meets a warm cast of characters: Blythe, the straight-talking café owner; Ellis Vane, a taciturn carpenter with a steady, unreadable presence; Dr. Rowan Theis, the town's cautious new doctor; and Pip, a solemn, perceptive boy who visits her garden and leaves her stones.

As Maren settles in, she begins to map something strange beneath the town's ordinary grief - a kind of hollow absence, like a wound rather than a weight, emanating from both the church and the lighthouse. On her tenth night, a large, otherworldly creature appears at her back gate. Unlike the unsettling void beneath the town, the creature feels like something that has carried grief so long it has transformed - and it seems to have positioned itself deliberately between Maren and whatever is pulling at the town from underneath.

The novel is atmospheric and quietly eerie, built on grief, perception, and the possibility that someone who sees what others can't may finally have found a place that sees her back.