THE MEMORY KEEPER

In this psychological thriller, an archivist works in a house haunted by secrets and a diabolical presence.

Mara, a divorced New Yorker with grown kids who are on their own, wants a break from her routine. So the archivist takes a job at the old Dumont House in Massachusetts, where she’ll stay and work for about a week. It’s definitely a change of scenery—a house that’s been empty for decades and so remote that cellphone coverage remains spotty. But she’s unnerved before she even begins recording and indexing everything. Mara sees things that she can’t explain, such as an envelope addressed to her that later changes into something else entirely. She chalks it up to stress but still feels as if the house is watching her. Then comes her obsession with the prior residents—Alaric Dumont and his wife, Isabelle. They’re shrouded in a dark history that Mara vows to unearth, particularly the reason Isabelle has seemingly disappeared from the public record. Surely, whatever’s lurking in that house will try to stop her. Taylor’s eerie novel, which kicks off a thematically linked horror series, practically drips with atmosphere. Mara, for example, observes what appear to be ghosts, although not everyone she sees has died. She’s also surrounded by a murky evil that lingers on the Dumont property. This atmosphere gives the author countless opportunities to deliver superlative prose: “Far below, the forest rippled in shadow. The trees moved in slow conversation with the wind, their branches creaking and swaying in unseen rhythms.” Mara’s troubled past earns her sympathy while her tenacity gives her circumstances plausibility (for example, explaining why she won’t leave the house). An overt but engaging parallelism between Mara and Isabelle plays throughout; both have suffered while dealing with controlling people. A twist in the final act proves effective and nudges the story toward an ending readers won’t soon forget.

A white-knuckled, sharply crafted piece of cerebral horror.