The Door in Penrose Forest
As a boy, Nico once accompanied his mother on a research trip to investigate a stalled migration of monarch butterflies. One night, upon hearing her sneak out of their rented cabin, he followed her to a clearing in the forest where a famed mansion once stood. Paralyzed with fear, he watched his mother climb a staircase and vanish, along with the stairs and the strange glowing door at its peak. No one believed his story, and as he grew older, he too stopped believing it was real.
As an adult, Nico returns to his hometown to care for his ailing father. But something strange is happening to the town. There are unexplained power fluctuations, people are going missing, and, reportedly, phantoms are roaming the woods. When Nico finds his mother’s field journal from the week she disappeared, including her account of the vanishing staircase, he begins to pick apart the mystery.
All the tangled strings trail back to the same starting point: the Gilded Age family whose mansion burned down under mysterious circumstances in those very same woods where his mother vanished.
Sean David Robinson
SEAN DAVID ROBINSON is a novelist and playwright whose work blends the eerie and the elegiac, exploring liminal spaces between the seen and unseen. A native of North Carolina, he began writing for the stage before turning to fiction; his off-Broadway play Starbright (2018) received two regional theatre awards for new writing.
In 2022, he joined StoryStudio Chicago's Novel in a Year cohort, where he spent two years developing The Door in Penrose Forest, his debut novel of speculative upmarket fiction—a haunting exploration of time, family, and the strange architecture of grief. His primary literary influences are the works of David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel.
Sean lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and fur babies.