THE GIRL FROM DARK DAKOTA

In this horror mystery, an unlikely group of detectives investigates the evil forces at work in a small town.

Donovan Graves is a parapsychology professor in Chicago with a well-earned skepticism of the paranormal, caught between a desire to debunk those he sees as fraudsters and a sincere yearning to know what waits on the other side of death. His work is fueled in part by his own grief over the loss of his son, David, who died in childhood. Now—in a moment when paranormal activity is on the rise across the world—Donovan feels for the first time that David is trying to contact him. A message appears in front of his son’s grave: “FIND HER.” Meanwhile, in Williston, North Dakota, high school senior Rachel Black is having her own problems with a ghost: recurrent dreams filled with screaming wake her in the middle of the night. Rachel knows who the screams belong to. Nearly a year ago on Halloween, a woman named Annabel Heller was murdered by her husband. Rachel isn’t the only one experiencing the supernatural. Jason Hardy has just arrived in Williston to perform an audit of the local hospital. Stationed in the old building while nearly all other personnel have moved to the new one, Jason begins to hear and see strange things. Chicago medium Madam Helen Bovell isn’t exactly on the up and up. She lost her psychic gift years ago, and ever since she’s been forced to scam her customers. But for some reason, her ability has recently come back—and tells her inexplicably to locate Rachel Black. As these four figures assemble in the remote town of Williston—“a place of drifting roughnecks and dirty riches beneath windy, barren plains”—a mystery involving restless forces demands to be solved. But just how dark can the mystery get? The seekers have less than a week to find out since Halloween is just around the corner.

Devore’s prose deftly vacillates between the concrete and the phantasmagoric: “Rachel drifted in and out of sleep. Her muscles were relaxed, and her body felt as if floating into a dream. Someone called her name, but the voice came from the dreamscape. The real world had fallen away, ceding its authority to the infinite realm of the mind.” The book unfolds slowly, the tension rising with every chapter, drawing its characters closer together while spiking the stakes. The small-town North Dakota setting, which is painted in even bleaker terms than readers might already imagine, is a perfect spot for this sort of ticking-clock ghost story. The novel evokes the spirit of 1980s horror paperbacks, both in its prodigious length (over 550 pages) and its unapologetic drift into classic—and sometimes campy—territories of the genre. The less said about the twists the better, but the author will keep readers engrossed all the way through. The ending, while perhaps a bit neat, satisfies well enough. An experienced writer of thrillers, Devore has made a successful sally into spookier realms.

A fun throwback horror tale that will keep readers on edge.