ONE OF US KNOWS

A woman with dissociative identity disorder finds herself at the site of the childhood trauma that caused her break, fighting for survival against threats both external and internal.

When Kenetria Nash wakes up, she at first has no idea that she’s been dormant for six years. Following an extreme childhood trauma, Ken developed DID in order to cope, and she and her seven “headmates” live in relative harmony within a castle-shaped inner world, though only three of the personalities, including Ken, are truly able to “front” for long periods of time. While Ken has been slumbering, Della and Solomon have been managing, dealing with Covid-19 and an increasingly precarious financial situation. Ken comes back into awareness standing on a dock, waiting for a boat to pick her up and ferry her to her new job as caretaker at an old estate on an abandoned Hudson River island. If this sounds like the setup for a truly strange horror movie—it is. Managing her various selves is the least of Ken’s problems, even as Della seems to have gone missing, because when they reach the estate, the house turns out to look exactly like the interior castle where all the headmates live. Not only has Ken apparently been here before, but soon her caustic ex shows up with his racist, misogynistic father, intent on hosting some kind of bizarre goblin hunting ritual—in a storm, of course. Her only ally is Celeste, who seems to run hot and cold with Ken, but ultimately may be her ticket to surviving the physical challenges ahead. Of course, she also has to deal with the mental challenges, not least of which involves the existence of a new headmate who looks an awful lot like a ghost spotted on the property. If it sounds a little over the top—it is. But there are enough twists and scares and unique elements to keep you reading. Ken can be hard to like sometimes, but she’s easy to root for.

A spooky, gothic setting disrupted by a totally modern heroine.