The Memory Keeper: A Gothic Horror Novel
About this ebook
“Taylor’s gripping haunted house gothic […] pulls readers in from the first pages and doesn’t let go until the end. […] creating an immersive reading experience that honors the pleasures of the genre while plumbing the weight of grief and trauma. The storytelling is assured and often electric, thanks to shivery detail steeping us in both the house and in Mara’s mind […]”
— BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly), Editor’s Pick
“A wholly absorbing dark mystery.”
— Kirkus Reviews
A descent into oblivion and the hunger of the forgotten.
The first doorway into the Oblivion Cycle...
Archivist Mara accepts a quiet contract to catalog the crumbling Dumont estate. She expects solitude and routine; instead she finds a house steeped in silence, where the walls listen and the mirrors shift when no one is looking. The longer she stays, the more her own reflection falters. Her memories bend, her thoughts blur, and the line between herself and the presence within the house begins to dissolve. Somewhere in its history, a woman named Isabelle Dumont was erased—and Mara senses that same fate closing in.
What haunts the estate isn’t a ghost. It’s a patient predator, practiced in the art of rewriting lives, and it has set its sights on her.
The Memory Keeper is a gothic psychological horror about coercion, haunting, and the violence of being forgotten. It's the first novel in Rowan Taylor’s chilling new series The Oblivion Cycle— standalone horror novels united not by character or plot, but by a single devouring idea: what if identity is not a fixed truth, but prey?
Each book opens a different doorway into oblivion, revealing how the self can be stolen, rewritten, hollowed out, or willingly surrendered.
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About the author
Welcome to the quiet horror of Rowan Taylor — where memories linger, love unravels, and the line between presence and absence is never quite clear. These are stories that don’t scream — they whisper, weep, and wait in the silence.
Here, hauntings are intimate. Familiar faces become unfamiliar. Rooms remember. And some doors never close.
Rowan Taylor writes unsettling fiction that blends psychological dread with the supernatural, exploring what it means to forget—and to be forgotten. She is also known as Tracy Fobes, author of eight award-winning paranormal romances published by Simon & Schuster and Leisure LoveSpell. Fobes has also independently published numerous romantic suspense stories, including Hard Charger and Billionaire’s Hidden Heart.
As Fobes, she wrote of witches, grimalkins, haunted seas, and dangerous love. As Rowan, she steps fully into the dark.
She lives near Philadelphia, owns too many books and too few flashlights, and believes the scariest monsters are the ones who know your name.
Noted by Critics
Rowan Taylor’s horror fiction has received two Editor’s Picks from BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly) and an A-rating for Croatoan, praised for its emotional intensity, atmospheric craft, and unforgettable imagery. Her screenwriting has been optioned twice, underscoring a body of work that blends cinematic tension with immersive, character-driven dread.
