Glass Girls

by Danie Shokoohi

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

A USA Today Summer Thriller Pick • A CrimeReads Most Anticipated Summer Crime Fiction • A Paste Most Anticipated Horror Book of the Summer

“Danie's earnest, spellbinding, and emotionally rich debut breathes new life into the classic ghost story.” ―Gillian Flynn, Gillian Flynn Books

“A tautly plotted thriller rife with magic and complicated sister dynamics.” ―Ashley Flowers, #1 New York Times bestselling author of All Good People Here

“A visceral, blood-soaked paean to the horrors and limits of love.” —CrimeReads

A former child medium is forced to face her deadly past and the ghosts she left behind in this electrifying debut.

Alice Haserot thought she'd escaped the curse. For sixteen years, she's lived far from her family and the ghosts she used to conjure. But her past isn't so easily left behind.

When Alice discovers she's pregnant and her estranged sister, Bronwyn, turns up on her doorstep, her carefully built new life begins to unravel. Bronwyn offers an ultimatum: one of her daughters is trying to possess the other, and only Alice has the power to save them. If Alice refuses, Bronwyn will go to their abusive mother and expose her location.

Forced to confront the terrors of her childhood, Alice returns home to face the inheritance of her family curse. Tautly paced and gorgeously written, Glass Girls explores the deep, complicated bonds of family and the shadows that follow us, no matter how far we run.

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Release date: June 24, 2025

Publisher: Zando – Gillian Flynn Books

Print pages: 314

Sample

A Lifetime Ago …

ONCE UPON A TIME, when Isabeau and Bronwyn Glass were still small enough to share the top bunk of the camper, in the years before Killian’s birth, before they moved into the Little House, back further still, before their mother met Frank, before they’d even heard of Kirtland, Ohio, their mother would tell them a bedtime story.

It was only a bedtime story in the sense that their mother told it to them after she’d tucked Beau and Bronwyn in for the night. The girls knew bedtime stories were meant to be sweet and soothing, an escape and a dream, but their mother’s story offered no such paltry comfort. It was meant, instead, to teach a lesson, and so she saved it for when Beau and Bronwyn had behaved exceptionally poorly—or after she had read their tarot cards and foreseen their misdeeds.

Night was when their mother was at her most dangerous, most capable of hurting them. The crackling overhead bulbs in the camper would camouflage her—dull the red in her hair, blur the sharpness of her freckles. She’d unfasten her many gold bangles, which jangled as she walked, and wipe the scarlet lipstick from her mouth. Without it, she’d look plucked, as fragile in her baggy t-shirt as a newly hatched crane. Their mother would smile through her story, but the smile, Beau knew, was an anglerfish, meant to lull them into complacency. At a single peep or whimper, she would snap her children into her mouth and gnash them up, bones and all. On their mother, softness was always a threat.

The version of the story Beau remembers best, the one her mother told most often, began like this: “Once there was a girl who cut off her shadow.

“The girl did it for love. She’d found herself with child, but her lover had refused to marry her. For she was the kind of girl like us, strange and marvelous. She could spell charms to bring down the rain and bake prosperity into pies, and she was born with the special gift of whispering the plants to harvest and the flowers to bloom. The lover named her magic a sickness, called her gift ‘dark’ and ‘devilish.’ That’s often the way with men, my darlings—they will love you for your power and yet fear what you can do with it.

“Though the girl would likely have done better raising her child alone in the woods—as I did with you—she loved him. But because she refused to give her idiot lover up, and because everyone knows that all manner of wonders live in your shadow, she decided, instead, to do a brave and stupid thing—she decided to cut it off.

“The girl packed a flint in the pocket of her dress, and she searched deep into the heart of the forest until she found the place where the oldest and wisest oak tree lived. The girl knelt between its gnarled roots and bowed her copper head to the dirt. ‘Old Oak, Old Oak,’ she whispered, ‘how can I cut my magic out?’

“The tree told the girl, ‘Young One, do not ask me for such a terrible thing.’

“Twice more the girl asked the oak, and twice more the oak denied her. But the girl was quick and the girl was clever and the girl pulled the flint from the pocket of her dress and told the tree, ‘Old Oak, Old Oak, tell me how to cut the magic out, or I will burn you down to a withered old stump.’

“The Old Oak trembled and blustered and begged, but the girl was resolute with the child stirring inside her. At last, his fear overcame

his wisdom. ‘Young One, it is not such a simple task to cut your shadow out,’ he said. The Old Oak told her then of the place where the forgotten gods had buried a knife so sharp it could carve a shadow free from the balls of a human’s feet. ‘But,’ he cautioned, ‘if you want to keep the magic gone, you must cut a rune spell into your heels and fill the wound with a paste of angelica and dill, burned to ash on a full moon. You must pack it into the trough of the wound in order to make the scar raise properly, for this is a ritual that can only be completed once.’

“I could tell you of the struggles she underwent to find this knife, of the sheerness of the cliff faces and the stalactite teeth of the caves, of her bleeding nail beds and the blisters on her palms—but some pains must belong to us alone. For all her ordeals, the girl found it at last, and on the new moon, she scraped her shadow clean off and cut the bind runes in its place.

“She wept and bled and thought she might go mad with the loss of it, but then she remembered her lover. Now he will marry me, she thought. She hobbled to him, her footprints bloodied with the evidence of her love. And though the lover had once feared her for her magic, he could no longer love the cloven part of her that remained.

“And that’s why we must never question our gifts, not for anyone.” Their mother would touch each of their cheeks, her hands blade-cold. “It is madness, my little loves, to buckle to the whims of a world that prioritizes happiness over power. Our gifts may be dark, and they may be dangerous, but without them, we’d be pathetically ordinary.”

Then, their mother would flick off the lights, leaving the girls holding hands in the dark, shushing each other whenever one would try to speak, afraid she would hear them—afraid she would come back. 

ONE

AS ALICE HASEROT STARES at the twin lines of the pregnancy test, her hands shake. She checks the booklet again; the test is still positive.

She slumps to the bathroom floor, digs her fingers into the fronds of the rug as if they can ground her. It’s February—most benign of all the months. The shortest, the youngest sister, filled with the bygone slush of January’s pristine snows. Month of nothing all that important, month of candy hearts staining the dirty mounds in the parking lots an artificial red, month of the last few stubborn Christmas lights coming down. Nothing bad is supposed to happen in February.

She needs to tell her boyfriend. She doesn’t like calling Eli her boyfriend—it sounds juvenile and tenderhearted—but he loves the term, so she indulges him. She met Eli two years ago on a dating app. Alice asked him out because he looked like a magazine ad for a wristwatch, glossy and crisp, and that’s what she’d thought she was looking for at the time. Their first date was to an ice cream shop, her pick. After Eli paid for her sundae, he admitted he was lactose intolerant but had been too nervous to suggest somewhere else. In person, he had a prettiness she wanted to touch, to see if he was as delicate as he looked.

They’d talked about kids on that first date. She was thirty-two then, and at thirty-two kids weren’t theoretical. She’d been relieved when he said he didn’t want any. Good, she thought. Not a worry here. Yet here she is, two years later, trapped in the bathroom with this damning piece of plastic.

Except, this is no time for Alice to be pregnant. Not ever, but especially not today. Alice had known that even as she pulled the test from its plastic wrapper. Susan, Eli’s mother, lands in two hours, and Susan already dislikes her. Alice spent her morning in a frenzy of rubbing alcohol and wood polish, because when Alice gets anxious, she cleans. “It’s okay,” Eli said, gently prying a dish rag loose from her grip, “Mom doesn’t really like me either.” But Alice doesn’t handle being disliked well, so she polished the kitchen faucet, reorganized bookshelves, washed the windows—anything to calm the rabbitlike pounding of her heart.

The test was like that, she supposed—another tick off her to-do list before she cleaned the bathroom. She was late and worried about it, so she’d decided to pee on the stick to stop fretting. She’d considered every possible outcome except the one in which she might actually be pregnant.

Alice has only lived with Eli for a month and a half now. She still hesitates before she touches his things, bunches herself up when she moves through the doorways to avoid intruding on his space. She hadn’t wanted to move to Saginaw, but Eli, an architect, designed this house himself. How could her rented condo compete?

It isn’t even that she dislikes the house—she could never dislike a place Eli designed—but she wouldn’t have picked it herself. The house backs onto a park, which itself breaches a nature preserve. “There are predators in the woods,” Eli warned her. The occasional timber wolf or bobcat, but mostly coyotes. In fact, the week Alice moved in, a pack of them attacked a neighbor’s dog, still attached to its owner’s leash. It was one of those soft-mouthed spaniels, all long

red and white fur and black teddy bear eyes; big enough that it fought back. It didn’t win. Alice tries not to consider this an omen.

So it doesn’t feel like home yet. Maybe it could, if she let it. She taps the pregnancy test with her forefinger, testing its solidity, its smoothness, its strange warmth.

Beneath her, the garage door vibrates. Eli, returning from the grocery store. Alice wipes her face with the back of her hands. She needs to tell him. Of course, she does—it’s the right thing to do. At the last moment, she hesitates, hand on the doorknob. Then Alice wraps the pregnancy test in a cocoon of toilet paper and buries it in the trash can under the sink. She tells herself motherhood, with her condition, is impossible. She tells herself she feels nothing.

Downstairs, Eli is standing on the other side of the kitchen island, surrounded by a sea of plastic bags—shredded coconut, candied pineapple, macadamia nuts. He’s been making his own trail mix for as long as Alice has known him. It’s one of the few residues of his eating disorder that they still allow. Eli almost died in his early twenties, goofing around while perched on the thick metal railing of a trolley bridge. He fell nineteen feet, shattering his rib cage on the half-submerged rocks below. His chest is half scar tissue, half metal. He emerged from his hospital bed weak limbed and shaking, treats his body like an animal that might spook. The result was orthorexia nervosa, an excessive preoccupation with exercise and eating healthy food—the words all far too mild for the way his near-death stalks him.

“You’re staring.” Eli clasps the jar and gives it a practiced shake. “Do you want to try this? It’s a new recipe.”

He will be the type of father who sends his kids to school with carefully calibrated sandwiches, she thinks. Their child will trade grained

bread for Fruit Roll-Ups. But this thought is in bad faith. There will be no child.

“Alice?” Eli focuses on her, the jar open and extended.

She realizes she hasn’t answered. “That’s okay. I’m going to slice up a lemon in a minute.”

Eli frowns, setting the jar on the counter. Alice shelves the cashew milk, but when she returns, Eli reaches out. His fingers graze her wrist, coarse with salt and sugar. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m just nervous. Your mom’s particular.” Alice doesn’t like lying to him, so this isn’t a lie, not precisely. His mother thrives on her own difficulty, and it’s her first visit since she moved to Scottsdale last year. Susan picked the most impossibly busy week to visit, last minute of course. Alice about sold her soul to wrangle the time off: She had to reschedule all her clients at the hair salon, which means a week of twelve-hour days when she returns, and one woman who wants Alice to achieve the improbable miracle of dark brown to white-blond. Eli has been on and off the phone all morning with his own new and particularly difficult client, a Dow Chemical exec who is insisting on breaking ground for his new house before the snow has even begun to thaw. They had to beg Susan to take the connecting flight to Saginaw; she wanted to be picked up in Detroit, a three-hour round-trip drive.

“We could send her to a hotel.” Eli flattens his palms on the counter, leans over them. “I’m only kind of joking. We could, if you want. Give me a reason.”

“It’s okay,” Alice says, because she can manage Susan. The bigger problem is growing inside her. She has observed over the years, with some horrified fascination, the way some of her Facebook friends post about their babies as produce. Today, our daughter is the size of a pea. Today, she’s a cashew, next week a strawberry. An entire grocery store inside them. That loose macadamia nut on the counter—is what lives inside her that big yet? Or is it a grain of rice? Is she a week late? Closer to two? She knows nothing about pregnancy, hasn’t been

 tracking her cycle, procrastinated taking the test. Even now—maybe especially now—it’s difficult for Alice to consider pregnancy as anything other than the act of being consumed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Eli grazes her knuckle, startling her. She pulls away without meaning to.

“We don’t need to talk about everything, do we?”

He hesitates and then forces a stiff smile. “I guess not.”

She shouldn’t get so defensive when Eli fusses like this. Before him, no one woke her from nightmares. No one handed her glasses of ice water before bed or kissed her teenage cutting scars or hounded her until she quit smoking. It’s her own fault that being taken care of makes her feel so exposed.

The lemon’s waxy rind is bright in her palm. Alice loves lemon slices dipped in sugar. She imagines them as sunshine, warm and painful and sweet. Something that will cleanse her entirely, so she will not have to consider the failure of her body, will not have to confess what it’s done. Is it cruel to tell him now, with his mother hurtling through the air toward him? It might be, but will he forgive her for waiting until Susan leaves? For all that he needs a gentle hand, Eli doesn’t like being handled gently.

Alice hesitates. “Eli.” She hates the smallness of her voice. Eli leans toward her, but then his cell phone rings.

He fishes the phone from his pocket and squashes it against his ear as he pours a bag of cashews into the trail mix jar. “Hi, Mom,” he says.

The lemon rolls across the granite counter and stills against a bag of Brazil nuts.

“Everything’s almost ready for you. We can’t wait.” Eli follows the lemon’s path and looks up at Alice, grimacing. He sets the phone on speaker as Susan complains about her layover—she’s been trapped in the airport all day, tired and hungry; why is the Detroit airport massive; she despises regional flights, next time they have to pick her up; she ate an overpriced meal at an awful,

greasy restaurant; she has heartburn; she can’t possibly handle the salt in Chinese takeout now, it’s entirely out of the question. Alice could almost laugh. With Susan, there’s always some urgent inconvenience.

As Susan drones, Eli shrinks over the counter, massaging his temples. “I got back from the grocery store fifteen minutes ago and we’re right in the middle of meal-prepping for the rest of the week.”

“God, will you give the meal-prepping a break. Every time I talk to you, you’re meal-prepping.” Through the phone, Alice can sense Susan bristling, the pursing of her lips, the setting of her jaw. Alice has a sixth sense for difficult mothers.

“We agreed on delivery.” Eli passes a hand over his face. They are three months into his latest recovery, but changing meals around still presents a significant stressor. “Would you rather do sushi?”

“What if Alice cooks?” Susan says. “How about that beef? The one with the wine sauce and those cranberries? I’ve been craving it for ages. Do it for your mom? Please?”

“Be reasonable, Mom. I can’t ask Alice to drop everything last minute because you have a craving.”

“Why not?” There’s a rustle on the other end of the line, as if Susan scraped the speaker against her coat. “If Alice minds cooking, she’ll say something. Ask her.”

When Eli is flustered, he reddens in swatches—his cheeks, forehead, the curve of his neck, right where the blond hair curls under the lobe of his ear. And if Alice doesn’t do something to mediate, he’s liable to spiral out for the rest of the night. The two of them will snipe at each other for hours, until Eli finally collapses into bed in a fit of piqued and bitter exhaustion, and Susan gripes about his inflexibility for the rest of the trip. Of course, Alice also has more selfish reasons to buckle to Susan’s whims, this mundane emergency presenting an opportunity for escape. She reaches across the counter and wrenches the phone away. 

light glaring off the faucet. “Beef and cranberry sauce is a great idea. In fact, it’s perfect for a chilly day like this. I’m glad you thought of it.”

“Oh. Good.” Point to Alice. Susan clearly didn’t anticipate that she was on speaker. “Well, I’m looking forward to it.”

When Eli ends the call, they stare at each other from across the kitchen. Alice sucks in her cheeks and bites down. If she moves, she’ll crack and tell him everything.

Eli breaks the silence first. He turns to the fridge and pulls out a bottle of Vernors. “What was that about?” The bottle hisses in his hands.

Alice counts to five in her head and leans forward on the counter. She knows she can’t hide behind it, but its slim coverage offers her a certain comfort. “This’ll make it easier to say no to other things later this week.”

“You don’t have to humor her. I really don’t want you to, actually. My therapist said I need to set boundaries.”

Alice knows.

“I don’t think I should go back to the grocery store.” The barely contained panic in his voice gives Alice pause. He’s picking at the wrapper on his bottle. A substitute, so he won’t pick his skin. Alice knows this about him, just as she knows that he wants a reason to be upset with himself when he’s actually upset with her. She can’t tell him about the test, not now.

“I’ll go.” Alice nudges past him to reach the junk drawer, from which she pulls a small yellow notepad and a pen.

Eli blinks once, then twice. “You hate the grocery store.”

Alice scribbles down the ingredients, holding the pen so tightly it leaves a red indent on her middle finger. “That’s why you’ll fold the laundry and chop the vegetables.”

“Why do you want to go to the store?”

Alice shrugs in a way she hopes is casual. “I need some air. Last chance and all.” She rips the page out of the notepad. The ink smears, staining her thumb. Almost free.

“Let me call her back.” Eli peers at her. “I’ll tell her we’re ordering delivery. I meant it, about the boundaries.”

Alice tosses the notepad and pen back into the junk drawer and pushes it shut with her hip. “It won’t take that long.” Alice cups his jaw, pelts the soft corner of his mouth with kisses until reluctantly, he smiles. “I’ll be home in half an hour.”

This is how Alice finds herself in the posh co-op off Gratiot Road, lifting cans of jellied cranberries, one a hand, trying to determine through touch whether Ocean Spray or organic will offend Susan less. Resolutely, she sets the Ocean Spray back on the shelf. There’s still buttermilk and sirloin to agonize over. Hopefully, Eli will set the table with the good dishes. Eli always remembers the outline of what he’s supposed to do, but never the particulars of it: He forgets the coupons during checkout, washes the dishes but forgets to wipe the counters. Alice fishes her phone from her purse and finds his contact. She types, bougie plates for dinner please? and adds a kissy face emoji. As she tucks her phone into the pocket of her purse, the back of her neck prickles.

She looks behind her. A woman, painfully thin, is watching her from the threshold of the aisle. The woman is still, but in her stillness, her skin quivers like a deer’s. Her fingers graze the chap of her lips. The nails are long and thickly lined with dirt. Her gaze, wide and wild, locks onto Alice’s. Her mouth parts into what could be called a smile if Alice were feeling generous. It forms creases at the edges of her eyes.

Something in Alice’s belly clenches. She almost recognizes the woman, but at the last moment, she chooses not to because the woman is impossible. Alice has spent so long telling herself the Family can’t find her that even

 now, with this woman staring at her, Alice tells herself that plenty of people have silver eyes and hair as red as Alice’s own. Alice is overreacting.

The woman whispers something low and impossible to catch. Then, loud as a keening, “Beau!”

A few stray shoppers turn their heads. A young mother glares up from her floral-printed diaper bag before trudging toward another aisle. Alice’s sweaty palms tighten uselessly around the handle of her cart. Suddenly, the narrow woman stutters into motion. She takes long steps down the aisle. Her stride exposes the thin thread of her leggings, holes studded up to the knee like constellations. Dried mud caulks the length of her bedraggled coat. The woman pushes carts and shoppers out of her way, does not excuse herself. Alice needs to move. Her feet are frozen to the tile.

The woman has mistaken her identity. The shouted name is coincidental. The Family can’t find her, not now, not after so many years. This is a mistake. All Alice must do is explain. Instead, Alice finally turns tail. She presses hard against the cart, speeding up to round the corner of the aisle, but the narrow woman is faster. She tugs hard on Alice’s elbow, sends her stumbling back. “For fuck’s sake, Isabeau.”

It’s the Isabeau that does it, that clarifies the narrow woman into her older sister, Bronwyn. Panic gathers low in Alice’s diaphragm. She yanks against Bronwyn’s grip, but like a finger trap, pulling only tightens it. Bronwyn tugs her close enough that their noses almost touch. She smells like stale cigarettes and unwashed bodies. “You didn’t recognize me? Really? ...