The House in Landow Creek
The house inherited by Ivory in The Inheritance has specific characteristics which prompted questions, the primary one being: is that a real house?
As my brother said when he read The Inheritance: “that’s our house!”
When I wrote that first novel, I knew I needed to be as descriptive as possible to lure readers into my world. The house my family lived in when I was a teen was special. There were carvings in the door lintels, over the fireplace and in the decorative eaves at the roof peaks unlike any other house I knew. In my youth, the story I heard was a Master Mason built the house and included symbols from the Masonic lodge in these carvings. Since that time, I have been assured, these are not Masonic emblems, so I’m unsure where that rumor began.
One of the things that always intrigued me about the house was a peculiar curved wall in one of the upstairs bedrooms. There was no discernible purpose for the curve and no corresponding curve on the back wall of the closet on the other side. The odd wall was just outside my bedroom, so I walked by it nearly every day.
Many years after I left home, someone who grew up in the same small village told me of another house a block away from where I lived has a similar curved wall. As you might expect, it was designed by the same architect.
This idea of twin houses planted a kernel of a plot in my mind. You’ll have to read The Sacred Woods: Book Two from Landow Creek to find out what happens.