About this ebook
Ten years can measure a reign, a ritual, or a ruin. In the gilded, watchful grip of an unseen authority, the villagers of Haxia live under the weight of whispered announcements, locked-room choices, and the slow erosion of trust. When a company decree sends every household into the mountains to gather medicine, the fragile peace of one family shatters.
Wang Cheng, the aging patriarch, clings to control as his sons and daughters-in-law—the sharp-tongued Zhao Hua, the reluctant Wang Qingqi, and the quietly strategic Bai Shu—fight over who must go, who stays, and who bears the cost. But the real battle is not in the mountains. It is in the looks exchanged across a dinner table. The cold calculations behind a father’s favor. The terrifying courage required to forget your own wants in order to live another hour.
Told in a dual-language echo that mirrors the split consciousness of those under oppressive rule, In the Raw, Returning Before the Day the Woman Enters the House is not a story of a single world, but of the fracture between them. It is a gothic, folkloric examination of bureaucracy, family, and the invisible scripts that decide our fate.
For readers of The Handmaid’s Tale and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a haunting, disorienting, and deeply human tale about the cages we build—and the monsters we are not taught to fear.
About the author
CATHERINE BRUNS is a writer who lives in the gaps between languages, genres, and states of being. Her work explores the unsettling architecture of power—the uniforms we wear, the silences we keep, and the quiet terror of choices made in locked rooms. She draws inspiration from gothic bureaucracy, folkloric traditions, and the stark clarity of instruction manuals twisted into nightmare.
In the Raw, Returning Before the Day the Woman Enters the House is her first dual-language narrative, written to live in the echo between English and German. She believes the most profound stories are told not in what is said, but in what is left unsaid.
When not writing, Bruns studies maps of imaginary territories, collects obsolete medical texts, and thanks the guides who help her navigate her own constructed palaces. She lives nowhere in particular, but her stories live in the chill of recognition.
