South African gothic horror about inheritance, memory, and what refuses to stay buried.
The Hand Mixer
Some families pass down recipes. Some pass down damage. In Greystone, it's hard to tell the difference. A gothic horror novel about the women of one family; and the things that have been waiting in the dark.
31 OCTOBER 2028
What if the trauma of your family's past could haunt you... literally?
When Alyssa Barnard's late grandmother, Ouma, reappears in her kitchen twenty years after her death (armed with a chocolate cake recipe and an unnervingly lively hand mixer), Alyssa's carefully constructed walls begin to crumble. The dead, it seems, have their own schedule.
Haunted by secrets her family has buried for generations, Alyssa is forced to confront the truth about her mother, her stepfather, and the scars left by Ouma's fateful visit to Die Heksbos, a place the women of her family do not speak about. Some silences are protective. Some are not.
Set in the Eastern Cape town of Greystone, The Hand Mixer is a novel about grief, generational trauma, and the ghosts that refuse to stay silent, not because they are restless, but because there are things that were never said.
Can Alyssa break the cycle before it consumes her?