THE HARROWING

Mags Sorley has spent eight years building The Harrowing into the best haunted attraction in three states. She designed every room from scratch — fourteen of them, each with its own mechanism, its own sightlines, its own way of making four hundred people lose their spatial reference on a schedule. When the owner died and left the building to his nephew, she had a plan for that too. She’s had a plan for this moment since Year 1.

Then Owen Pentland arrives with an insurance problem she can’t dismiss and a notebook full of correct observations about things she already knew needed fixing.

Before Mags can run her season and manage the new owner at the same time — there’s the debrief he attends without being invited and somehow takes the right corner of; the night she finds him in Room Fourteen after close, not taking notes, just standing in the warm light trying to understand what the room is for; the way he watches three groups move through Room Eleven from a maintenance corridor without writing a single liability notation; the two-hour walkthrough of all fourteen rooms she finally agrees to, ending in the one room that frightens him, lights off, where they solve the problem neither of them could crack alone; and the specific moment she realizes he hasn’t asked her to be less than she is — not once, not about anything.

She’s spent eight years making herself indispensable to something she’ll never own, protecting the work by keeping everyone out. He’s spent his whole career assessing risk from a professional distance, routing around the one category of thing he can’t evaluate — until the only person who can take him through it is the one he can’t afford to need.

Small-town Pennsylvania October, a building that earns its own scare, and a thirty-seven-night season that ends whether they’re ready or not.

The kind of book where the grand gesture is a man standing on the platform he’s been afraid of for six weeks and not leaving early.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Holiday Romance sits at 5.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 55–90 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — and the Halloween/haunted-attraction lane is reader-requested with virtually no high-heat indie supply

→ Triple-category eligibility (Holiday, Small Town, Workplace) stacks discoverability from three separate reader pools simultaneously

→ Enemies-to-lovers with a 37-night ticking clock — structural urgency that drives the “I HAD to know what happened” experience BookTok shares

→ The competent heroine / hidden-vulnerability hero pairing generates sustained “he fell first” reader discussion — the configuration most likely to produce organic word-of-mouth

→ Found family cast of forty seasonal actors delivers the ensemble warmth that anchors the highest-performing small-town romance titles — built-in community, recurring-character potential, readers who stay

TROPES:
• Enemies to Lovers
• Workplace Romance
• Forced Proximity
• Opposites Attract
• Competent Heroine
• Hidden Vulnerability
• Art vs. Pragmatism
• Found Family
• One Season to Save It
• HEA

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / High Spice — build-flexible; two intimacy scenes flagged for Dial the Heat™ at any level; the banter burns at every setting and the emotional throughline holds at closed door too

Perfect for fans of: Tessa Bailey, Erin Sterling, Sarah Adams, and Emily Henry