A grade-A, weirdly comforting, and familiar stew of domestic drama, slasher horror, and primeval evil.
A family that's banished itself to the woods of rural Pennsylvania finds more than they bargained for when supernatural forces decide they would make quite a snack.
Prolific and delightfully profane, Wendig pulled off a good trick last time with his sprawling, inventive, and prescient apocalypse chronicle, Wanderers (2019). This is another doorstopper, but here he returns to macabre horror reminiscent of his supernatural Miriam Black novels, injected with a juicy dose of Stephen King–like energy. An eerie opening introduces Edmund Walker Reese, a serial killer strapped into Pennsylvania’s electric chair circa 1990 for murdering four girls—a killer who disappears the second the switch is flipped. In the present day, former Philly cop Nate Graves is stewing over the death of his abusive father, who's left him a home in the woods. Maddie, Nate’s artist wife, thinks it’s perfect for her work, not to mention a natural refuge for their hypersensitive son, Oliver, who's imbued with not only a preternatural empathy for others, but also a gift for lending the pained some solace. At Nate's new job as a Fish and Game officer, his partner, Axel Figeroa, always has one eye open for trouble because of their proximity to Ramble Rocks, where Reese committed his dirty deeds, as does the Graves' neighbor Jed Homackie, a whiskey-drinking peacenik with secrets of his own. As happens, things get weird. Nate starts seeing his dead father around every corner. Maddie experiences fugue states that aren’t simpatico with her newfound predilection for chainsaw sculpture. Oliver gets the worst of it, finding himself caught between a couple of vicious bullies and a newfound frenemy, Jake, who quickly emerges as someone—or something—far darker than he appears. The characters are eccentric and likable even if their plight isn’t quite unpredictable, and the book will be catnip to horror fans, complete with meddling kids, doppelgangers, dimensional fissures, demons, and ghosts; it's a prototypical edge-of-your-seat plunge into real terror.
A grade-A, weirdly comforting, and familiar stew of domestic drama, slasher horror, and primeval evil.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-399-18213-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Hovers awkwardly between YA fantasy/romance and magical realism for grown-ups.
Debut adult novel from the bestselling author of The Last Legacy (2021) and Namesake (2021).
August Salt was 18 when he was accused of murdering his friend Lily Morgan. No longer welcome on Saoirse, the tiny Pacific Northwest island where they lived, he and his mother moved to the mainland, changed their last name, and started a new life. Fourteen years later, his mother’s insistence that her ashes be buried on her ancestral home sends him back to a place he didn’t expect to see again. For most of Saoirse’s residents, his return is unwelcome. For Emery Blackwood, it stirs up feelings she’s spent her whole adult life trying to suppress. An isolated community, an unsolved mystery, long-buried secrets coming to light: This is a classic setup for psychological suspense or gothic horror, and this story offers a bit of both. But it also offers a little something extra: The women of Saoirse are witches. Young has written several young adult novels full of invention, adventure, and sorcery. By the end of this novel, though, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she decided writing for grown-ups means combining a dour, lifeless tone with a plot that barely moves. And there’s something almost perverse about a narrative with a witch protagonist being so miserly with magic. The central tensions driving the story are pretty simple. Neither Emery nor August has ever recovered from the abrupt end of their youthful romance. Lily’s murderer has never been found. The people of Saoirse are worried that August will try to reclaim the orchard that his grandfather left to the community. Saoirse is a place unlike any other. The most compelling of these—the mystery surrounding Lily’s death, the unique nature of the island—get the least attention. August and Emery only decide to investigate their friend’s murder late in the novel. And, despite every first-person narrator here assuring us that Saoirse is a singular place with its own rules, the island comes across like any other small, insular place that depends on a seasonal tourism industry—sporadic acts of witchcraft notwithstanding.
Hovers awkwardly between YA fantasy/romance and magical realism for grown-ups.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35851-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Less a mystery than a compelling, interlocked portrait of two troubled souls.
A pair of antagonists with eerily complementary vocations square off against each other.
Rita Todacheene, a Navajo photo specialist for the Albuquerque crime lab, not only sees dead people but hears them too, and they have plenty to say. Margarita Montaño, one of six children shot to death along with their parents, tells Rita that even though her surviving brother, Jude, has been in police custody ever since he walked into the First Desert Light Church with an empty revolver, he didn’t murder his family: “It was Daddy.” But although Steven Montaño left behind photographic evidence that he abused all three of his daughters, he was a retired Albuquerque PD detective, and the blue wall closes around him. Since no one credits Rita’s secondhand testimony—which, granted, does sound a little far-fetched—and the cops insist that she keep her ideas to herself, she quits her job, leaving herself unmoored and adrift. In the meantime, Brother Gabriel Jensen, who’s moved by an equally strong passion to help the street people of nearby Gallup by setting them free of their mortal coils, graduates to murdering former Gallup mayor Emmitt Gurley, whose ghost threatens Rita with serious harm if she doesn’t bring his killer, whom he declines to identify, to justice. The high-profile deaths that follow lead Det. Arviso to ask Rita for help. Rita, who can’t turn down another Navajo, takes up the gauntlet, setting the stage for a final battle with an adversary who also hears voices and acts on them even more decisively than she does.
Less a mystery than a compelling, interlocked portrait of two troubled souls.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781641294768
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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