Museum of Cursed Artifacts: A Novel

An epic haunted house tale that combines the classic supernatural terrors of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House with the fantastical adventure and eclectic ensemble of Night at the Museum.

Reclusive billionaire William Buren spent his life collecting the world’s most cursed artifacts and housing them in his expansive upstate New York mansion. After Buren’s death, his dismayed heirs discover the estate is bankrupt. They have only one path to profit: transform the mansion into the world’s greatest haunted attraction, a Disneyland of horrors, the Louvre of haunted houses.

To give their project credibility, they assemble a team of renowned experts in their respective fields: a cancelled celebrity ghost hunter, a traumatized psychic, a defrocked exorcist, a terminally ill archaeologist, and a controversial physicist. All of them have one thing in common: they want the pot of gold promised to them at the end of this dark and twisted rainbow.

The assignment is simple. Spend a weekend in the mansion, confirm the authenticity of the artifacts, verify any phenomena, and endorse the museum. In return, a hefty sum for each of them. But the entities contained in these artifacts possess a will, an intelligence, and an agenda of their own. Our protagonists discover they have been chosen by this place, at this time, for a diabolical purpose.