Marla

By: Jonathan Janz

From beloved horror author Jonathan Janz, Marla is a slow-burn, full-throttle horror novel about the families we inherit, the guilt we carry, and the terrible gravity of a gaze you can’t forget. Listen—if you dare.

In King’s Branch, Indiana, everyone knows the Gorman House. Everyone whispers about the girl in the upstairs window.

Detective Carl Lancaster is driving the same back road he’s driven a thousand times when he glances up—and meets a stare that freezes him to the bone. Minutes later, a body turns up. Coincidence, he tells himself. Then it happens again.

Annie Frost, a child-protection social worker with a crumbling home life, is used to walking into other people’s nightmares. But a tense visit with a volatile family ties her fate to the Gorman house—and to a secret she’s spent her entire life suppressing.

Dylan Ellison, twenty-one and drifting, comes home for the summer and finds himself drawn to the beautiful, enigmatic Marla Gorman. Curiosity becomes obsession; fascination becomes fear.

As strange deaths ripple through the county and rumors sharpen into patterns, Carl, Annie, and Dylan are pulled toward the same locked door: a creaking Victorian filled with moonlit hallways, a shadowed toy room, and a presence that smiles without kindness. In a town that wears its love of horror like a badge, suspicion is contagious, memory is dangerous, and some windows look back.

©2026 Jonathan Janz (P)2026 Blackstone Publishing