A bleak and haunting multigenre tale.
In this paranormal novel, a woman discovers she has mysterious ties to a handsome but bewildering stranger.
It was Elisabeth’s idea to backpack in Ireland with her fiance, Josh. But the trip and her engagement end prematurely when she finds definitive proof that Josh has been unfaithful. She goes off on her own and takes a tumble in the woods only to have an apparent dream of a dragon abducting her. This is especially troubling, as she’s had a lifelong recurring dream of a dragon proclaiming she is his and the two living together in immortality. Elisabeth awakens in the village of Oakshire, where a “healer,” Constantine, is tending to her injury from the fall. He’s certainly attractive, but Elisabeth keeps her distance, as she’s fresh out of the turbulent relationship with Josh. But Constantine seduces her: He may have genuine feelings for her, having lost the woman he loved to murder. Elisabeth, meanwhile, just wants to get home to Philadelphia, but with a flooded road and no cell service, it doesn’t appear she’s going anywhere soon. Although fate may have connected her dreams with Constantine’s past, he has a shocking plan for Elisabeth. While surprises await Elisabeth, Drighton provides enough clues that readers will predict most of them. But this is the striking story’s essence: a relentless dread, with unpleasantness seeming inevitable. As in her preceding novel, The Ghosts of Winworth Manor (2019), the author writes erotic scenes tinged with a sense of uneasiness. Although her straightforward prose gives explicit erotica a romantic overtone, readers will be aware of something dark in certain characters’ motivations. Even dubious individuals get the spotlight (and perhaps sympathy) in the ominous narrative’s episodes, from the backstory of Constantine’s lost love to Josh’s post-breakup encounter that ultimately links to the main plot. Despite the memorable ending implying a possible sequel, this engrossing novel works as a stand-alone.
A bleak and haunting multigenre tale.Pub Date: May 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68470-207-7
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.
The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-née-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593156568
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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