A complex, haunting novel that explores a schizophrenic young artist’s struggles with her perception of reality… including an intriguing ghostly woman who appears to her in the most mysterious ways.   India Morgan Phelps—Imp to her friends—is trying to write her memoir, but she struggles with the unreliability of her own mind. Suffering from schizophrenia, as well as comorbid anxiety and OCD, Imp has a difficult time separating fantasy from reality. But for her, it’s most important to tell her “truth.”   And for Imp, that truth comes through a stream-of-consciousness tale of her love story with her transgender girlfriend, as well as Imp’s obsession with a mysterious woman whom she finds naked and mute at the side of the road. Imp must push past her mental illness—or work with it—to piece together her memories and tell her story.   A rich exploration of mental illness, gender identity, and creative process, The Drowning Girl delivers an eerie and powerful story of a woman’s efforts to discover the truth that’s locked away in her own head.   “Caitlín R. Kiernan moves firmly into the new vanguard […] of our best and most artful authors of the gothic and fantastic—those capable of writing fiction of deep moral and artistic seriousness.”—Peter Straub “Incisive, beautiful and as perfectly crafted as a puzzle-box, The Drowning Girl took my breath away.”—Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author of Red Glove   “This is a masterpiece. It deserves to be read in and out of genre for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Bear, author of Grail   “A beautifully written, startlingly original novel.”—Elizabeth Hand, author of Illyria “With The Drowning Girl , Caitlín R. Kiernan moves firmly into the new vanguard, still being formed, of our best and most artful authors of the gothic and fantastic—those capable of writing fiction of deep moral and artistic seriousness. This subtle dark in-folded novel, through which flickers a weird insistent genius, is like nothing I’ve ever read before. The Drowning Girl is a stunning work of literature, and if I may be so blunt, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s masterpiece.”—Peter Straub “In this novel, Caitlín R. Kiernan turns the ghost story inside out and transforms it. This is a story about how stories are told, about what they reveal and what they hide, but is no less intense or suspenseful because of that. It’s a tale of real and unreal hauntings that quickly takes you down deep and only slowly brings you up for air.”—Brian Evanson, author of Last Days   “ The Drowning Girl features all those elements of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s writing that readers have come to expect—a prose style of wondrous luminosity, an atmosphere of languorous melancholy, and an inexplicable mixture of aching beauty and clutching terror. It is a ghost story, but also a book about the writing of ghost stories. It is about falling in love, falling out of love, and wondering whether madness is a gift or a curse. It is one of those very few novels that one wishes would never end.”—S. T. Joshi, author of I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft   “Kiernan pins out the traditional memoir on her worktable and metamorphoses it into something wholly different and achingly familiar, more alien, more difficult, more beautiful, and more true.”—Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times bestselling author of Deathless Caitlin R. Kiernan is the author of nine novels, including Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds , and The Red Tree . Their award-winning short fiction has been collected in six volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; and, most recently, A is for Alien . They have also published two volumes of erotica, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus . Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, they currently live in Providence, Rhode Island. 1 “I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed. “A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,” she also typed. I also typed. My name is India Morgan Phelps, though almost everyone I know calls me Imp. I live in Providence, Rhode Island, and when I was seventeen, my mother died in Butler Hospital, which is located at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, right next to Swan Point Cemetery, where many notable people are buried. The hospital used to be called the Butler Hospital for the Insane, but somewhere along the way the “for the Insane” part was dropped. Maybe it was bad for business. Maybe the doctors or trustees or board of directors or whoever makes decisions about such things felt crazy people would rather not be put away in an insane asylum that dares to admit it’s an insane asylum, that truth in advertising is a detriment. I don’t know, but my mother, Rosemary Anne, was committed to Butler Hospital because she was insane. She died there, at the age of fifty–six, instead of dying somewhere else, because she was insane. It’s not like she didn’t know