Pigeon House

by Shilo Niziolek

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Pub Date Apr 12 2024 | Archive Date Apr 23 2024

Querencia Press

General Fiction (Adult) | Women's Fiction

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Description

Pigeon House is pulled from the stories women tell each other in hushed tones over a tea-kettle, a firepit, at the nail salon, while stirring a steamy cauldron, or kicking mud into an open grave. It's cottagecore meets bog witch, Ophelia floating down the river in the John Everett Millais painting, Anne of Green Gables if she lived in modern times and only ever loved bad men, Stevie Nicks if her album Bella Donna was a haunting. Pigeon House is for the Practical Magic cult-witches who spent the late 90's sectioning themselves off between the Jillians and the Sallys only to wake one day as the aunts. It's for the manic-pixie-dream girlies, the Harley Quinn used-to-be's, the ex-girlfriends of Heathcliff and Team Jess and Jimmy Angelo. You'll come for the magic, stay for that youthful gnawing hunger, and leave with the ghosts of your lovers past.

Pigeon House is pulled from the stories women tell each other in hushed tones over a tea-kettle, a firepit, at the nail salon, while stirring a steamy cauldron, or kicking mud into an open grave...

Advance Praise

"Pigeon House captured me at once with its lyricism and haunting-and haunted-characters who face the often harsh realities of the world through fantasy, transformation, and violence turned inward. Shilo Niziolek's commanding, poetic voice is mesmerizing, and her stories will take root in your psyche and won't let you go. You'll find yourself eager to succumb to their magic"

-Lara Ehrlich, author of Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020) and Bind Me Tighter Still (Red Hen Press, 2025)

"Pigeon House swerves from the living and ghosts alike, evoking a curiosity for untidy endings where pain feels good: "Deep in the muck of the belly of that particular beast, adolescence," Niziolek connects characters and the spaces they haunt, where love and sex and the tipping points we avoid are sacred spaces, confronted with melancholy and familiarity. The ghosts of all our losses and desires come back to haunt us."

-Hillary Leftwich, author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock and Aura

"Pigeon House captured me at once with its lyricism and haunting-and haunted-characters who face the often harsh realities of the world through fantasy, transformation, and violence turned inward...