MOON MOUNTAIN

A college student in the North Carolina foothills finds herself a pawn in a deadly game in Porto’s thriller.

Morgan Thomas and her roommate and best friend, Sheridan Gallagher, make their way to a friend’s Halloween party. Morgan’s still wearing her woodland fairy costume hours later when she wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark wooded area as some great creature bashes its way through the trees above her. She manages to make it home, but in the morning finds herself unable to speak about her experience to Sheridan (“Before I could begin to describe what had happened, my throat suddenly tightened and felt drier than chalk dust, and I had to take a sip of my coffee to moisten it. My head also started pounding rhythmically inside my skull”), who thinks she may have had too much to drink. Morgan does remember an odd encounter with a tall man dressed like a ninja, who simply put his hand on her shoulder and looked at her without speaking. After the strange incident, she finds herself revisiting the forest, sometimes in her dreams and sometimes in real life. What strange forces are affecting her? And why can’t she tell her friends what’s going on, even as she finds herself at the scene of a murder? The plot rolls out slowly and impressively; just as Morgan begins to get a feeling about what is happening to her, she’s so caught up in the action that there’s not much she can do. Morgan spends her most adventurous moments dreaming or sleepwalking; in her waking hours, she has even less control over her life. So what is the reader to make of Morgan? With the introduction of a young detective, Grayson Blair, who Morgan first notices as she’s bartending a gala event hosted by Sheridan’s wealthy family, it begins to seem like she has found an ally and secured a fighting chance. But expectations continue to be subverted up to the story’s sequel-setting climax, which is tinged with elements of romance, fantasy and even SF.

A basic damsel in distress story turned upside-down.