A supernatural thriller with an intriguing premise but uneven execution.
In Harrison’s speculative mystery, a young woman anxiously searches for her missing sister in a disaster-struck city with the help of a jaded detective.
Six months after a catastrophic explosion destroyed a downtown New York nightclub, a huge swath of the city is still designated a Quarantine Zone, ostensibly because of biological or chemical contamination from a secret military facility beneath the club. The QZ is heavily guarded and under continuous drone surveillance, and incidents of unexplained, unprovoked violence multiply; a mysterious blogger, Ominosity, spreads a sinister warning that “things are not under control.” In this dismal setting, a young woman named Miki Preston searches for her missing sister, Jennifer, a talented photojournalist. Miki keeps glimpsing phantom faces that seem to be screaming, but which vanish upon second glance. She sees the same shadows in the backgrounds of Jennifer’s last photos, taken at the scenes of suicides and murders; Jennifer saved the images in a folder labeled “In Case Something Happens To Me.” Miki tries to convince world-weary police Detective Levi Mathis to help her find Jennifer, but he warns her off. Mathis is looking for answers of his own; his teenage daughter was killed in the nightclub blast, and he suspects that authorities are using the QZ to cover up criminal activity. Harrison weaves in subplots involving a colorful pair of street kids, elements of Mathis’ past, mobsters, clandestine psychological experiments, and covert intelligence to effectively create an ominous world. The setting is a gritty New York City, full of dark alleys and dank tunnels. However, its geography will be confusing to readers familiar with the real-life city; for example, 10th Avenue and 24th Street is in the Chelsea neighborhood, not Soho, and 7th Avenue is west of 8th Street, not north of it. The story timeframe is also distractingly unclear; there’s a passing reference to “Bloomberg’s nanny campaign,” for instance, and people have smartphones, but don’t seem to use them to communicate. Still, the writing flows quickly, despite occasional repetitions, and the ending hints at the possibility of a sequel.
A supernatural thriller with an intriguing premise but uneven execution.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781680577372
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Wordfire Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
© 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.
