Torch Lit Ink is celebrating this upcoming ‘dark academia’ gothic contemporary fantasy from Parker A. Garner with a release blitz event!

📆 Release Date:  October 3

𝑩𝒍𝒖𝒓𝒃: 

Some houses don’t just haunt you—they claim you.

Maggie isn’t sure when she started to feel it—that slow drift into numbness. Her passions feel like distant memories. Her friendships are fading. Her own life feels like something she’s watching from outside her body. So when she follows her friends into a famed haunted house on Halloween night, she doesn’t expect to walk out changed—because she doesn’t walk out at all.

Inside the House of twisting shadows, something calls to her. Something ancient, hungry, and eerily familiar. She becomes Magpie, bound to the house’s twisted master, a dark mage who collects broken souls to fuel his magic. In one timeline, Magpie is pulled deeper into the house’s illusions and monstrous truths. In the other, years later, Maggie tries to rebuild her life, tries to outrun the darkness—until the house comes calling again.

When the mage steals the one thing tethering her to this new world, Maggie is forced to return—not to escape her past, but to confront the creeping dark inside her, and finally choose whether to surrender or fight for her life.

Magpie is a haunting, allegorical fantasy for fans of dark magic, lyrical prose, and stories that explore the shadows we carry within us.

Tropes:

• Dual Timeline / Then & Now
• Dark Academia Meets Haunted House
• Falling for the Monster / Morally Gray Love Interest
• The House is Alive
• Deal with the Devil
• Found in the Dark / Lost to the Light
• Girl Unravels (and Rebuilds)
• Mental Health as Magic / Allegorical Fantasy
• Power Imbalance Romance
• Tragic Past, Dangerous Present
• Emotionally Complex Heroine
• Open Door Spice in a Gothic World
• Villain Love Interest (…or is he?)
• Trauma Bonding
• Escaping a Toxic Bond
• Confronting the Past to Save the Future
• Beauty in the Macabre
• Haunting as Healing

Spice: 🌶️🌶️ – open door spice