A hard-hitting, if unevenly executed, horror tale.
Eerie supernatural events take place in a small-town general store in Thorne’s novel.
The story mostly takes place on and around March 21, 1955, in the town of Hollow River during a torrential thunderstorm. Eight people seek shelter in a store called Beard’s General, and in this conservative, religious town, everyone’s beset by secrets, guilt, and shame. There’s Peter Mayberry, a White church musician grappling with his sexuality and in love with Sam Brooks, a younger Black man. He’s haunted by memories of his devoutly religious mother’s disapproval and extreme physical abuse. Eli Wynn is an adolescent who’s berated for indulging his sexuality, and Jerry Beard faces the same stigma and shame from his own mother, Kathy, as she tries to keep things going at the general store. Mark MacDonald is the local pastor who commits the sin of thievery, stealing from Kathy and the church fund to make ends meet. Donna Gilliam, meanwhile, kills her husband in their home to keep her baby, Theo, safe, and stops at the store on her way to the hospital.Finally, there’s Marilyn, a beautiful, mysterious woman who washes up at the store. Many of the characters grapple with their sins and shame, but one is a gruesome predator, feeding upon their guilt to stay alive. The group must band together or get washed away—both literally and figuratively. Thorne’s book relies on Christian themes of salvation, absolution, and apocalypse to further the plot, with suspense revolving around whether people can overcome their personal demons to face a greater one together. The story ends on a note of reconciliation and peace as well as an afterword reflecting on real-life disasters that inspired the book’s events, such as flooding in Mississippi. His messages regarding judgement, shame, and guilt come through strongly and hit with great force. The prose can be tedious at times, though, with gratuitous, graphic descriptions of sexual violence and an excess of sexual metaphors. Still, Thorne fleshes out each character’s backstory in measured detail, making them problematic and relatable, by turns.
A hard-hitting, if unevenly executed, horror tale.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-938271-53-3
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Lost Hollow Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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