From Out My Heart

In a remote, riverbound community, an Edgar Allen Poe scholar becomes entangled with a woman visited by his wife’s ghost, unraveling desire, possession, and limits of the self.

From Out My Heart is a darkly sensuous novel about two women whose bodies become the threshold through which the living and the dead insist on speaking, from the award-winning author of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days. When Phyllipa, a scholar chasing the lingering pulse of Edgar Allan Poe, travels to a remote, river-ruled community, she finds herself drawn into the orbit of Lana: a woman whose faith, exhaustion, and old wounds make her strangely open to visitation. Their encounters unfold in a landscape of heatstorms, thickets, and swollen riverlight, where possession is not a metaphor but a physical event: a tremor in the voice, a shift in the hips, a borrowed breath. As Phyllipa records Lana’s transformations, she feels her own interior loosening – the boundaries between scholarship and desire, between inquiry and complicity, dissolving into the wet dark of the woods. Rainsford crafts a gothic of flesh and inheritance, where motherhood, harm, and spectral longing press against the skin. A novel of haunting in its truest sense: the way another life can move through a woman’s body, and the way a woman can become the echo chamber for what history refuses to release.