Ashes to Ashes (Bigsby Family Saga) by JB Langley

Description

Paperback. ISBN: 9798234083487

Witchcraft, grief, forbidden love, and institutional horror intertwine in Ashes to Ashes, the haunting first installment of J.B. Langley’s Bigsby Family Saga.

Set against the bleak landscapes of early twentieth-century Northern Maine, this atmospheric LGBTQ gothic novel follows Katherine Bigsby, a woman born into a bloodline whispered about in fear and superstition. The women of her family possess uncanny gifts, abilities capable of bending emotion, perception, and fate itself. But in a world ruled by rigid expectations and patriarchal control, such power is dangerous.

After a youthful indiscretion threatens her family’s reputation, Katherine is forced into a suffocating arranged marriage where her spirit and supernatural gifts are steadily diminished beneath the weight of duty and silence. Tragedy follows relentlessly: the devastation of the Spanish Flu steals her child, while further heartbreak and violent loss push her toward emotional collapse. As strange visions and buried truths intensify, Katherine finally dares to reveal what she knows.

Instead of being believed, she is declared unstable and committed to an asylum.

Behind the institution’s locked doors, Katherine discovers she is not alone. Other women confined within its walls harbor secrets, gifts, and scars of their own. But the asylum conceals horrors far beyond cruel treatments and medical neglect. Women disappear. Abuse thrives in the shadows. And those in power will do anything to preserve the system controlling them.

Amid the darkness, Katherine finds an unexpected source of hope through a forbidden sapphic romance that blooms in secrecy and desperation. Together, the women risk everything to uncover the truth and expose the corruption surrounding them. Yet escape may prove more elusive than freedom itself.

Blending historical fiction, supernatural suspense, feminist gothic horror, and queer romance, Ashes to Ashes explores the weaponization of fear against powerful women and the resilience required to survive systems built to erase them.

Moody, tragic, and richly atmospheric, this novel is perfect for readers who enjoy gothic family sagas, asylum horror, queer historical fiction, witchcraft narratives, and emotionally layered supernatural suspense.

Some women inherit power.
Others inherit the punishment for possessing it.