Scary fun that won’t cause nightmares—or will it?
Dark horror by the renowned Norwegian crime novelist.
In the town of Ballantyne, Richard Elauved is a troubled 14-year-old outcast who bullies his classmates. He coerces Tom into a telephone booth (remember those?) and gets him to call Imu Jonasson, an apparently random person whose name he finds in the phone book. But the phone digs into the poor boy’s flesh and eats him up until all traces disappear. Richard goes to the police but cannot persuade them of the horrible truth—for one thing, they can’t find Jonasson’s name in the book—and they demand to know if Richard drowned Tom in the river. In the first third of the tale, all the main characters are teens. Fifteen years pass, and Richard attends a class reunion. Now he is the author of The Night House, the story they’re in and “the teenage horror novel that had changed my life.” He says he came to the reunion to apologize for having bullied everyone, yet all his fellow alums insist he’d been an okay kid, not the nasty bully he’d portrayed in his famous book. So who’s right? Creepy stuff continues, including death by hanging, blood drooling down a car window, transmogrification into a cockroach—you know, standard horror fare. What adds a level of interest is Richard Hansen, who had invented the surname “Elauved” for a curious reason. Perhaps he has a mental illness, given that events belie perception. What is true, and what is the detritus of his fevered brain? Is this a dream within a dream? Some of the evil comes from a surprising source, who advises young Richard, “If you really want to kill them, you have to do it twice. If you don’t, they come back.”But an ill-fated fiend named Jack has the best line: “We’d actually prefer it if you tried to escape. It’s a well-known fact that adrenaline gives meat a bit of extra flavor.”
Scary fun that won’t cause nightmares—or will it?Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780593537169
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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