A flawed but inventive selection of four creepy stories.
Bratton collects four previously published horror stories in one chilling volume.
Urban legends inform these four spine-tingling tales, each of which works as a stand-alone story even as their characters and frights occasionally intersect. The lengthy opener, “Who’s at the Door,” riffs on the familiar sleepover legend of Bloody Mary. Following a car accident that breaks her foot, a 17-year-old girl stays home in suburban Ohio while her parents fly off on a two-week Hawaiian vacation. As an added measure of security, her father has installed a motion sensor on the front porch before leaving; using an app, the girl can check to see who’s at the door without having to walk downstairs. But what happens when the sensor starts going off every day at the same time—when, according to the camera, there’s no one there? In “Parasomnia,” a woman has trouble sleeping after the death of her father and the dissolution of her marriage. One night, after a mere five hours of slumber, she experiences a strange hallucination: “Upon waking, something very bizarre happened—before my closed eyes were a series of rapidly moving images in succession: crisp, high-resolution stills of unrelated people and places moving quickly along my field of vision.” One of these images is of a perfectly handsome man—so perfect that the woman tries to solve the mystery of his identity. It turns out he’s dead…and his intrusion into her life may be the opposite of perfect. “Dollhouse” concerns a man’s ill-fated purchase of a handmade Japanese dollhouse and its three toy occupants. His wife is not amused by the acquisition, and she’s thoroughly unnerved by the handwritten book that accompanies the house, which details the alarming backstories of each of the dolls. The culminating “Who’s Back at the Door” is a sequel to the first story, picking up seven years later, featuring disappearances, murders, role reversals, and more, further building on the legend of Bloody Mary.
Bratton’s prose is conversational and breezy, moving the narratives quickly from scene to scene. This approach sometimes prevents the tension that fuels these stories from fully developing, leading to moments that aren’t quite as scary as they should be, such as this passage from the collection’s first entry: “I looked at my phone. It was 3:33 AM, and there was a message saying there was motion at the door. I played the video, and I screamed in terror! There was someone at the door…” It’s a shame, because the premises are usually solid ideas that would benefit from a bit more space to breathe, particularly “Parasomnia” and “Dollhouse,” which construct intriguing worlds that don’t fully pay off. The balance feels wrong; each plot complicates itself with unnecessary exposition when it should linger in its ambiguity. The book lives up to its urban-legends theme, however, with the stories capturing the unsettling familiarity of tales passed through multiple tellers. Fans of quick, efficient thrills will likely enjoy Bratton’s collection and will anticipate the promise of future volumes to come.
A flawed but inventive selection of four creepy stories.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781736771532
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Blue Milk Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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