Equal parts unsettling and unpredictable, an overstuffed but compelling modern ghost story.
In Castle’s paranormal thriller, when a family moves to a mysterious prison island, they experience eerie visions and terrifying encounters with the local residents.
Teenagers Ella and Daisy are skeptical when their father, William, moves them to the Isle of Portland off the south coast of England, especially after learning that it’s a prison colony. As the family members integrate themselves into their new community, they’re drawn into a nightmare of violence, hallucinations, and the specters of the town’s cursed history. The roots of this history are revealed in a parallel 14th-century storyline as sailor Galfridus returns to Portland to support his wife, Isobella, and daughter Lucia. Their relief quickly turns to terror as madness overtakes Galfridus, forcing Isobella and Lucia to defend themselves from the man who should protect them. Castle’s debut novel is an ambitious work of folk horror that deftly oscillates between 1348 and 1999, grounding each setting in period-specific dialogue. (“Listen, can you have a walk round the village and see if anyone’ll let us have another potato or two? We’ll pay them back, tell them, when he starts work. Promise them we will. Look sad, when you ask, like you do now, eh?”) While the narrative focuses on Ella, Daisy, and Lucia, this is no frothy teen ghost story. The violence is vivid, graphic, and unrelenting, barely giving readers a chance to catch their breath between sequences. While the alternating storylines offer brief moments of relief, they also make the narrative feel unwieldy, especially as side characters, like village elder Gwen and Ella’s visiting classmate, Lucas, steal focus. The novel’s parallel plots take too long to converge in a satisfying way (the text runs to nearly 500 pages), but the overlapping narratives effectively underline the story’s focus on generational trauma and the danger of an unexplored past: “History is the wolf at the door…. History consumed and continues to consume every last one of us, insatiable.” Fans of literary folk horror will be haunted by this ghost story for years to come.
Equal parts unsettling and unpredictable, an overstuffed but compelling modern ghost story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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