Content Guidance

This book is set on a locked psychiatric ward and is narrated, in part, by something that hunts the people there. It contains self-harm rendered as ritual; sexual coercion and its aftermath; and a predator the reader is meant, for a while, to love. None of it is decorative, and it does not end gently. If you are close to any of it right now, the book will still be here later.

In specific terms, the novel contains:

• Sexual content, including sexual coercion by a person in authority
• Self-harm: ritual cutting, recurring, in detail
• The slow loss of memory and self, written close to how dementia looks from the outside
• Violence, including a killing
• Childhood abuse, depicted in memory
• A character’s willing self-destruction

If you are in crisis in the United States, call or text 988.