Assisted Living

Miss Marple meets The Shining in this folk-eco-horror set in the wilderness of the Oregon mountains.

All recent widow Margie Thermopolis wants to do is survive her last few years as an elder-care facility inspector then retire with her four cats, an ample stock of local IPA, and watch roller derby. She's haunted, not by the promised but yet-to-happen visit of her dead husband, but by his medical debt and her discovery of his secret bonsai tree hobby. When she's sent to inspect a boutique assisted living facility built on the razed site of Old Grove Lodge, she's forced to face long buried secrets: for Old Grove Lake is the site of the ill-fated Camp Keturah and her little brother's death fifty years earlier-for which she blames a mythical forest spirit, the tree witch.

At Old Grove, named for the cluster of centuries-old trees standing by the once pristine mountain lake, Margie must face not just her own suspect memories, but a manipulative, privileged lumber baron, Hayden Wylend, and his bizarrely ill mother, Mother Wylend-both intent on destroying the last of the old-growth trees. Trapped in the sparkling new assisted living facility by an early blizzard along with the Wylends, a flamboyant chef, a secretive caregiver, and a handful of high-paying residents, it's not just Margie's past that's coming to the surface: with assistance from a pissed-off Mother Nature, something with a far older vendetta is about to awake.