THE GLASS-FACE MAN

A recent high school graduate attempts to save her mother and the world in Park’s YA horror novel.

Josie Morris isn’t happy to see the ghost of her dead father at her high school graduation ceremony. She doesn’t believe the ghost is real, of course, but the last time she saw him, her mother forced her to take antidepressants. Even so, the ghost offers her a cryptic warning from across the crowd: “Ten days.” He tells her a story about a Kentucky dragon, an extinction event, and a swarm of creatures called blacklegs located deep in the ground that are about to surface like cicadas. Josie has an even more disturbing vision that night at the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her mother: a winged figure with hooves and a glass mask dragging a chained woman down the hallway. When Josie escapes her hallucination, her girlfriend Clara is there to comfort her, but they soon discover Josie’s mother has gone missing. Desperate to find her mother, Josie follows a trail of clues left by her father before his suicide—including a confusing notebook and a long-lost cellphone—to her father’s hometown in Kentucky, where her Uncle Don may hold the key to these strange happenings. Whether the coming apocalypse is real or merely a madness specific to her family, Josie knows she has to solve the mystery if she doesn’t want to suffer the fate predicted in the one word the glass-face man spoke to her: burn. Park succeeds in creating a feeling of disquiet that pervades every sentence, as here when the girls land in Kentucky: “The air here was heavier than in New York, strong with pollen, like a close-up inhale of dandelion weeds. Past the lot, a tangle of concrete highways cut them off from chain hotels and a distant amusement park. But that tense pull wasn’t going away. Something knew they were here.” Unfortunately, disquiet is pretty much all there is; no recognizable world or relatable characters are established to anchor the reader, and the plot unfurls by means of a dream logic that, while creepy, never makes much sense.

An unsettling but shapeless suspense novel.