WRAITH

A young woman must survive the twists and terrors of a family curse in Wheaton’s horror novel.

As the story opens, readers meet young Cecily LeClercq as she’s living her life just the way she prefers: mostly alone, and surrounded by the natural world. She explores the South Carolina shoreline along the Edisto and Wadmalaw Rivers, occasionally finding interesting specimens to share with her friend and boss, Ina Anolik, the owner of an exclusive Charleston landscaping firm. Cecily’s peaceful life has been won at a hard cost; when she was a child, she saw her mother driven into the hurricane-churned surf by a terrifying wraith. But Cecily’s current peace is upended by the arrival of a messenger from France, where her old and ill great-grandmother has summoned her to the estate of the ancient, powerful LeClercq family. Cecily decides to go, despite her awareness of a malediction bedeviling the family—a curse that seems to find each new generation; a casual internet search reveals that years ago, her grandfather apparently went insane, murdered her grandmother, and then took his own life. Although her great-grandmother dies while she’s en route to Paris, she feels an immediate kinship when she sees the house she’s inherited: It’s absolutely full of plant life, like a miniature forest. But there are dangers lurking, not only in the ranks of the LeClercq family, but also perhaps in the supernatural realm, and Cecily may be marked for death.

Wheaton makes a shrewd decision to present Cecily as likable from the start, and she serves as an effective Everywoman for the reader as the plot takes bizarre turns. These include the revelation that the LeClercq curse has a ruthless proviso: It isn’t just the heirs, but also the people around them who may fall victim to the titular wraith, and these troubles may only be avoided if the heir commits suicide. The family’s sardonic old retainer doesn’t believe in the curse, but Cecily’s great-aunt, the Countess Aline, urgently warns her that it’s very real, indeed. Wheaton does an efficient, controlled job of drawing the reader into that reality—first with genuinely creepy vision flashes and then with real-world horror manifestations that are significantly enhanced by the author’s evocations of various, creepy French locales. The pace continuously escalates, and each of Cecily’s discoveries about her family’s past makes her more determined to understand the curse and to figure out how to survive it. As she tracks the murderous wraith closer and closer to its lair, Wheaton loads his narrative with shocking moments and the equivalent of Hollywood-film jump scares. The cast of characters that Cecily meets in the vicinity of her family home are quickly and colorfully fleshed out, and even in the darkest and diciest moments, Wheaton remembers to give these supporting players some choice lines. Longtime readers of horror and gothic fiction will find little that’s new in these pages, but the pace and energy that the author brings to the task more than compensates for its familiarity.

An involving and fast-moving family-ghost thriller.