THE SHADOW HOUSE

An Australian mother’s retreat to a bucolic eco-village two hours from Sydney is shadowed by ever more menacing echoes of an earlier tragedy.

When her 14-year-old son, Oliver, was suspended from his high school for conduct unbecoming, Alex Ives retaliated against the school, the world, and her abusive mate by abruptly uprooting her children and moving them for a three-month trial rental to Pine Ridge, an alternative community Ollie scorns as a commune for aging hippies and baby Kara is mercifully too young to judge. Everything will be fine, her landlady and upstairs neighbor, Jenny, and Pine Ridge founder Kit Vestey assure her. But everything is far from fine. Maggie, a Pine Ridge veteran, mysteriously takes against her from the get-go, and it’s not long before the other neighbors begin to gossip. A series of increasingly nasty practical jokes awakens rumors of the Pine Ridge witch. Stuart, the abusive restaurateur Alex fled, disappears after threatening to find and punish her. More and more, Alex’s troubles seem an uncanny echo of those that beset Renee Kellerman, whose husband, Michael, once owned the farm that became the site of Pine Ridge: the vandalism, the dead animals, and ultimately the message Renee has apparently sent her: “My son was taken. Yours will be too.” Will Ollie follow the path of Gabriel Kellerman, the teenager who vanished 10 years ago? Downes is less interested in drawing the threads of her mystery together into a tightly logical web than in sowing the seeds of psychological terror, rooted in everyday traumas from sleeplessness to coping with teens, and branching out to create a nightmare world.

A hair-raising mood piece you’ll be glad to awaken from.