GIRL AMONG CROWS

Thirty-three years after a traumatic—and dramatic—time that destroyed her family, Daphne Gauge tries to uncover the truth of the past in order to prevent the same things from happening in the present.

In 1988, several boys in the small town of New Minton, Massachusetts, go missing, including Daphne’s kid brother, Paul. Her father runs a Unitarian church, but there are undercurrents of a darker kind of faith among the town’s inhabitants, and rumors of sacrifices and other rituals involving raven masks. When young boys begin to disappear, possibly part of these rituals, Daphne learns that her mother is from one of the oldest families in town and might herself be implicated in Paul’s disappearance. There is abuse within the family, and secrets, and ultimately a violent confrontation and conflagration that indelibly marks Daphne, her father, and her siblings. In 2021, Daphne receives a strange visit from a boy she knew in childhood. When two more boys go missing, she begins an investigation seeking to root out the evil at the heart of New Minton once and for all—easier said than done, for the entire town seems to be in on it. The switching of narration between 1988 and 2021 becomes jarring as Daphne’s mental state gets more and more precarious. She becomes obsessed with revenge to the point that she abandons her own husband and children. The worldbuilding, while intriguing, is also distracting, because it’s often hard to tell how far New Minton slides into the supernatural. Sometimes it seems like a white supremacist cult with a basis in Nordic myth and pagan rites; sometimes, there are stranger things going on. This unevenness and uncertainty is hard to overcome.

A heap of folk horror, maybe a dash of Salem witches, in a steaming cauldron of confusion.