Content to shock with gore and vague psychological discomfort.
After surviving a home invasion, Sydney Burgess begins to realize that there is something, literally, inside her—something malevolent.
It’s the setup to many a psychological thriller: A woman finds a masked stranger in her house. She manages to cut herself loose and escape. That’s Sydney Burgess’ first memory, anyway, when she awakens in the hospital, but then she learns that the intruder is dead. Stabbed 28 times, actually. Sydney has no memory of this brutality, but as she returns home with her boyfriend and 11-year-old son, she notices other strange things: posters that seem to drip from the walls, a mysterious mechanical toy. As a former addict now nine years sober, Sydney feels like she’s living a double life at the best of times; as memories begin to resurface about the killing of the stranger, Sydney finds that there is something inside—a force, an entity, a power (it’s unclear)—driving her to investigate him. Discovering messages from the murdered man to her boyfriend, she realizes that they are connected through a pharmaceutical company. Then, through flashbacks, it's revealed that Sydney, just like the stranger, has been part of an experiment meant to temper the memories of addiction. Instead, things continue to go horribly wrong until there is nothing but carnage and tragedy and a deep, deep darkness. The “science” of this novel is shady and slight, which makes it hard to understand what's really going on. The title conjures up a tradition of visitations both divine and demonic, yet the answer is decidedly unmystical, even if it is a bit mystifying. For a while, it even seems like the darkness inhabiting Sydney may be a metaphor for the haunts of addiction. Then, once things are “explained,” the story really goes off the rails.
Content to shock with gore and vague psychological discomfort.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-62948-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Redhook/Orbit
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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