LIGHT COME, LIGHT GO

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.