This Is Where You Join Me

From International Thriller Award nominee Carla H. Krueger comes a gripping short thriller about secrets, deception, lost love, choices and fate.

Seeing is not always believing.

Natasha Haughton, a young business woman with everything to live for, awakes one day to an unfamiliar room in a cold, abandoned house with no explanation of how she got there. She is alone and there is no sign of whoever put her there. Faced with confusion and uncertainty, Natasha tries to understand what is happening. Clues exist – but, for some reason, she is blind to them.

Rules govern the rooms, but no one explains what they are.

Natasha must learn to survive her new reality if she is to get out with her sanity intact, but deception, secrecy, silence and loss fill the derelict house. The quiet is not a comfort; it is a menace. The walls seem to breathe; the pipes rush with what sounds like blood. Driven by a desperate desire to make sense of this strange, decaying world, Natasha explores the house more and finally discovers the clues she missed – her grandfather’s old tobacco case, a book she scribbled in as a child and a window that looks out onto memories….

Face your fears or cease to exist.

To escape, Natasha must challenge everything she knows, question what she believed to be reality and look deeper inside her own mind and the minds of those who say they love her – the same people who are ready to decide her fate without her. Can she break free or will she be forever lost inside?

“A beautiful, sympathetic tale that is both unique and unequivocally human; a study of one person’s struggle against unfathomable adversity. It’s everything we fear from our worst nightmares – that moment when our own bodies become our biggest enemy.”

In this elegant, emotionally-charged and unsettling short novel, Carla H. Krueger takes us on a vivid journey into the contradictions of human nature and the mysteries of consciousness. We travel deep into the mind of a woman who becomes lost within herself, whose body and thoughts seem alien. As time progresses, the world she inhabits gradually reveals itself to be the most frightening lie; it is all but a prison, designed to do nothing but trap her. Drawn from a heady mix of real life, confused memories, pure imagination and the lunacy of dreams, This Is Where You Join Me is more than a thrilling, original story, it offers us a powerful insight into ourselves, exploring how we learn to hide from our deepest desires and how, if we’re not careful, we can fall victim to other people’s dangerously misguided truths.