A Plate for the Dark

After her grandmother's death, Ingrid Fossum returns to the family farmhouse in northern Minnesota to clear the estate, prepare the property for sale, and close the door on a chapter of family history.

Ingrid is practical by nature and by profession. As an insurance claims adjuster, she believes in evidence, causes, and explanations that hold up under scrutiny.

Her grandmother believed in something else.

Every winter, from the solstice through Epiphany, Astrid Fossum placed a plate of food on the back step at dusk. Once the plate was outside, the back door stayed locked until morning.

No one in the family can explain exactly why.

To Ingrid, the custom is little more than an old superstition that has outlived the woman who kept it. The farmhouse is being sold. The ritual can end.

But in the long northern dark, old habits do not disappear as cleanly as expected.

As Christmas settles over the isolated farm, Ingrid begins to question how much of her grandmother's strange tradition was grief, how much was fear, and how much was something the family simply stopped asking about.

A Plate for the Dark is a quiet, slow-burning folk horror novel about inheritance, grief, family memory, and the dangerous comfort of believing that every mystery has a rational explanation.