Martha Louise Hunter

A young girl’s terrifying nightmare, five mysterious oil paintings, and a red, flaming firebird all have the same message: stop running, stand still, and let the funnel cloud suck you up inside.

     Juliana Birdsong is your typical eight-year-old with an obsessive-compulsive mother who’s too paranoid to leave the house. Making double-lined, black-out drapes to protect their home from the outside world, her mother only looks up from her sewing machine when Perry Mason comes on TV—the type of successful lawyer Juliana should marry if she wants to get anywhere in life.
  But Juliana has other things to worry about. Night after night, she’s awakened by a terrifying dream where she’s chased down a long, tapering highway on the back of her father’s motorcycle heading for an enormous, twisting funnel cloud that waits on the horizon. Even after locking it away inside her bedside drawer, little Juliana wonders if there are parts of the dream she hasn’t seen yet.
  Years later, she finds dynamic trial lawyer, Oliver Morrissey and she marries him for love. Life is going reasonably well for the priviledged socialite—that is, until she’s faced with losing everything, including her children.
  Stepping out of her Lexus, Juliana peels off her Chanel sunglasses and glares up at her childhood home that’s now smothered in ivy. Inside, there’s only her estranged father left, who she’s sure caused her mother’s death. Moving in, she discovers a nude portrait of her with a curious set of tiny red footprints on the ankle, and another surprise she wasn’t expecting:  Her father has Alzheimer’s and he needs her. Plus, a shipment of mysterious oil paintings arrives, all with his signature.
  When Juliana puts a brush in his hand, it sets off a surreal time warp and the canvases begin to eerily transform, painting a different picture of the parents she thought she knew. As tragic secrets emerge that mirror her own, Juliana’s old demons come back to haunt her.
  Consumed with his care and desperate for her old life back, the dream is still chasing her and it’s catching up fast. Just when she can’t run any faster, the funnel cloud is waiting on the horizon, twisting even faster than before.