Raw thriller meets darkly funny coming-of-age for an enjoyable, unsettling debut.
In this dark and twisty debut, Setton crafts a clever thriller-cum–expat narrative for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.
Daphne, a directionless 26-year-old Londoner, lands in Berlin with little plan for her time there. Living off her parents’ money, Daphne expects to make friends, find love, and discover her real life, the one she keeps expecting to appear and replace her bleak and circumscribed existence. A strange and violent event one night at her subleased flat leads to her gradual paranoid spiraling and the transformation of the city in her eyes. Berlin devolves from a hipster mecca into a nightmarish hellscape as Daphne struggles to hold on to her tenuous sanity. Setton’s sentences are the real draw here. She peppers Daphne’s speech with sharp observations about modern life, youth, and the burdens of contemporary womanhood. As Daphne's time in Berlin drags on, marked by her waning body mass and increased running mileage, she encounters many colorful characters, including internet dates, local Berliners, fellow expats, one ex-boyfriend, and a possible stalker. Daphne’s unreliability—her tendency to double back, correct the record, and manipulate the reader—creates a sense of disorientation that only enhances the slippery plot. Setton expertly portrays the wily, seductive nature of addictions and dysfunctions, and her novel's humorous voice belies horrors both small and large. While most of the book eschews thriller genre conventions, replacing usual plot beats with rumination and drifting (and the occasional footnote), the novel never lags. Daphne’s youthful despair and loneliness are horror stories in and of themselves—ones from which it is hard to look away, especially when coupled with the evocative German setting.
Raw thriller meets darkly funny coming-of-age for an enjoyable, unsettling debut.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780143137627
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
