I Have Been Here

History buried it. The dark remembered.It is older than civilization, older than fire, older than the first human word for fear. It feeds on the comprehension of its prey — not the terror, the understanding. It evolved alongside us because we alone are capable of knowing what is being done to us.In 1673, Robert Hooke went down into a shaft on Oak Island with the pirate William Kidd and the engineer Thomas Bushell. They built a labyrinth around what they had found and sealed it. Hooke kept one of the four keys, returned thirty years later, and died with it.Three hundred and fifty years later, the seal is failing.Nathaniel Silver, an archaeologist at the American Museum of Natural History, finds a chest in an archive he was not supposed to be in. Greg DeFrentis, a salvage engineer hired by a foundation he cannot trace, descends into the Oak Island shaft alone and feels, on the third night, the dark below him move. A historian on a hillside in upstate New York has been waiting forty years for this knock on his door. A genetics researcher in Westchester County is informed by something speaking inside his head that they are now, in its words, colleagues.The chain is older than any of them. It has been carried, link by link, from a Paleolithic hunter to a Mi'kmaq witness to a polymath in a London graveyard to a young Franklin Roosevelt who saw what was in the shaft and spent the rest of his life trying to forget. Now it has reached them.I Have Been Here is a debut novel of literary horror — a multi-era account of what we bury, what remembers, and what is asked of the people who agree to carry the knowing forward.For readers of John Langan's The Fisherman, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation. Read more