Seven months after burying his wife, carpenter Efraín Colón moves his two sons into a condemned Bronx tenement, rent-free, in exchange for gutting it. It is the only offer he has. He says yes eleven minutes into the meeting.
1919 Vyse Avenue has been sealed since 1979. No pigeons land on it. There are two hundred children's teeth at the bottom of a pipe chase, and a door in the sub-basement nailed shut with forty-one hand-forged nails.
On the first night, nine-year-old Beni hears his mother's voice in the wall. It is exactly her voice - and it has been down there since the night she died.
What Jonas Bronck put under the boundary stone in 1639 was bound with iron, salt, milk, and a name written in blood, and the binding runs ninety years, not a day longer. It was last renewed in 1936. Midnight on Halloween is the ninetieth year.
With the help of a Bronx archivist who has waited forty-seven years for someone to walk in and ask her about that building, the Colón men have thirty-one days to learn the rules of something that has never once taken anything by force. In four hundred years, everything it has ever gotten, somebody handed to it.
THE BRONCKHAVEN is a folk horror novel about grief, memory, and what it costs to keep the people you have left. It doesn't want your life. It wants your name.
Dad
