M.S. DONOVAN

The Rosarium: The Klipa Veil

Debut Novel

M.S. Donovan is a writer of literary gothic horror and poetry from the North Shore of Long Island. Her work explores the ways power hides inside family, and what gets called madness when no one wants to look closer.

Her debut novel, The Rosarium: The Klipa Veil, is a generational horror about women whose perception, creativity, and bodies are extracted through a spiritual-economic system—and what it costs to reclaim that inheritance. The manuscript was developed with World Fantasy Award-winning editor Paula Guran and received a craft-level edit from Bram Stoker Award-winning Editor-in-Chief Brett Savory of ChiZine Publications.

She currently resides in New York with her family.

Âmes de la Brume. Mirror and a candelabrum, with a candle burning on a surface nearby. The Rosarium.

The Rose Ledger. The Rosarium. Black and white photograph of a wilted rose with dry petals and leaves, lying on a dark surface.

Bronze sculpture of a group of women holding hands, standing together outdoors on a pedestal, with trees and a partly cloudy sky in the background - inspiration for Âmes de la Brume. engø gård - sculpture by Nina Sundoye

Black and white photo of train tracks leading to a small pavilion or shelter surrounded by trees, with a cloudy sky above.

Black and white photo of a woman with long dark hair, sitting in front of a framed portrait of a man with a mustache and hat. A lamp is visible on the left side of the image.

You come from women who taught themselves forgetting.

nature, texture, iceland, moody, photography, otherworldly iceland, underground, underworld, otherwordly, woodland,

You are not the author. You are the archive.

A black and white photo of a vintage stone house with red flowers and lush garden plants in front.

On Long Island's Gold Coast, Sabine Kent-Rhodes is raising her twin sons in a cottage on her husband's ancestral estate. Writing a memoir to steady her unraveling life, she begins to notice disturbances gathering at the edges of the ordinary. When one boy develops violent, unexplained fevers and the other begins speaking about things he cannot possibly know, Sabine begins to suspect the illness is inherited.

After their grandmother's funeral, Sabine and her sisters uncover journals linking their maternal bloodline to a fraternal order that stripped the women of a sacred perceptual gift, redirecting that inheritance for their own wealth and influence. What the family long dismissed as instability was soul-level fracture—generations of women rendered vessels for a system that feeds on them.

In Sabine's twins, the binding reckons with more than it was designed to contain.