A page-turning horror exploring (and adding to) New England folklore and myth.
A Gulf War veteran struggles to keep his family together—and his sanity intact—when faced with multiple crises in Alo’s horror novel.
Curtis Reynolds is not a happy man. An overworked third-shift laborer who spends weeks, sometimes months, away from his wife and child, Reynolds is summoned home when a hurricane traveling up the East Coast is predicted to travel dangerously near his family’s Connecticut house, which is located on a river. He dreads returning to an estranged wife and a crumbling marriage, a child with special needs, a pile of bills, a flooded basement, and a house that’s in the process of being lost to eminent domain due to a mysterious project funded by the government. Suffering from past war trauma (“The surrounding men, including himself, lay speckled in shrapnel, surrounded by a smoldering blur of twisted metal”) as well as nightmares associated with a woman he killed while driving drunk years earlier, Reynolds is not prepared for what he discovers on his street, already being battered by the storm: brutally murdered neighbors, destroyed houses, roaming colonies of feral cats, and a nightmarish beast stuck in his basement that simply can’t be real. With his sanity possibly slipping, Reynolds investigates and finds revelations in an abandoned neighborhood across the river. There’s a lot to like here: Alo’s writing is focused and fluid, creating a fast-paced and action-packed narrative that never flags. His adept ability to intertwine multiple threads of tension—the raging storm, PTSD-induced hallucinations, nightmarish creatures, marital conflict, and secret government installations—keeps the intensity impressively high throughout, weaving a thick tapestry of terror. One quibble: The overuse of description in places sometimes slows the narrative momentum. Still, the jaw-dropping plot twists will keep readers on the edges of their seats.
A page-turning horror exploring (and adding to) New England folklore and myth.Pub Date: March 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781088097984
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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