Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide, pregnancy loss, child death, and anti-Indigenous racism.

From an introduction by the editor, Amelia Larkin

The Prologue is an excerpt from the Introduction to Visions from the Other Side, a fictional text written by the novel’s protagonist, Sara Shea. The Introduction was written by Sara’s niece, Amelia Larkin.

In the excerpt, Amelia says her aunt was “brutally murdered” in 1908 at the age of 31. After her aunt’s death, Amelia found pages of Sara’s journals hidden throughout Sara’s house. Amelia published the journals as Visions from the Other Side. She thinks Sara’s writings will “change everything we think we understand about life and death” (5). Amelia says she thinks the final pages of Sara’s journals will be the most revealing, but that those pages have been lost.

January 29, 1908

The novel opens with an excerpt from Sara’s journal. Sara writes that she first saw a “sleeper” when she was nine years old. She was in the woods near Devil’s Hand, a rock ledge in the Vermont wilderness, when she saw Hester Jameson, a girl her age who had died of typhoid fever two weeks prior.