A supernatural theatre thriller

The Prompt Book

Name: The Prompt Book
ISBN: 9798177899831

The book is directing the performance.

Historian Mara Vale encounters a century-old prompt book at a Boston auction. It leads her to the Bellwether Theatre, where stage directions become real and crossed-out names disappear from records, photographs and memory.

haunted theatresupernatural thrillerprompt bookreality-rewriting stage directions

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Behind the curtain

A script that rewrites reality

Theatre historian Mara Vale has devoted her life to preserving forgotten stories. When a century-old prompt book filled with impossible annotations leads her to Boston’s Bellwether Theatre, unseen voices call cues, doors open on command and cast lists change overnight.

Then the prompt book begins writing back. With stage manager Owen Keene and a frightened company running out of time, Mara must uncover the truth behind a forgotten cast before the book completes its final revision—and erases more lives from photographs, records and memory.

Behind the book

When stage directions become reality

A prompt book records the instructions needed to bring a performance to life. In The Prompt Book, those instructions acquire an authority no theatre company can safely ignore. Historian Mara Vale encounters a century-old book at a Boston auction; it leads her toward the Bellwether Theatre, where its stage directions become real.

The threat reaches beyond the stage. A crossed-out name can disappear from photographs, records and memory, making the book a danger to the evidence that a person ever existed. Mara and stage manager Owen Keene must confront a forgotten cast before the final revision is complete.

This cursed-object thriller brings theatrical control into conflict with human identity: what happens when the document meant to preserve a production can erase the people within it?

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From the novel

Read an excerpt from The Prompt Book

CHAPTER I — Lot Seventeen, Under Glass

Mara Vale slipped past a pair of plaster urns with their flaking gilt leaves and handed her damp coat to a boy in a black vest who looked too young to be trusted with anything older than a toaster. He hung it anyway, pinching the wool between two fingers, as if age might come off on his skin. Beyond him, the Tremont House annex opened in a hush of carpet, glass, and old money trying not to smell like mildew.
The room had once been a ballroom or wanted to be one. A pressed-tin ceiling sagged in one corner. Two chandeliers glowed the color of nicotine through half their bulbs. Along the walls stood display cases lit from within, each one making its contents look saintly: silver-backed brushes, a lot of yellowing cartes de visite, a row of opera glasses nestled in blue velvet, a boxed set of playbills she had come to see and, if the room did not turn stupid, to buy.
She signed the paddle sheet at a card table whose lace cloth had tea rings hidden under a crystal bowl of peppermints. MARA VALE, bidder 112. The woman at the table looked up at the name, then back down, and wrote it with a little more care. People in Boston’s old institutions still did that when they heard Vale, as if lineage might be collecting at the same sale.
It wasn’t lineage. Not really. It was a grandfather with a TV voice and a father who had lent his name to a repertory fund before he drank through the family charm. Mara took the paddle, tucked it under her arm, and crossed the room toward the case holding Lot Nine.

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