More questions than answers. Lots more.
An Atlanta woman who reports her husband missing from the cabin they’re sharing in the Georgia woods doesn’t realize that his disappearance will rapidly become the most normal-seeming event in her life.
Michelle Stage has only recently forgiven her husband, Cliff, a used-car dealer, for his adultery. When he leaves their isolated cabin to track down the source of a mysterious light and then doesn't return, Sheriff Louden Fisk assures her that no one else has lived anywhere close by ever since the vanishing of realtor Pink Souder, who built the cabin, and his mother, Wiccan priestess Mattie Souder, years ago. Before Michelle even has time to shift from worrying to grieving, Cliff turns up minus a finger he claims to have lost in the car crash that claimed their teenage daughter, Cassie, who Michelle just knows isn’t dead. But since Fisk and Deputy Elmer Bogan claim that Michelle’s the one who was reported missing and that they’ve never met her before, she doesn’t really know what she knows. Under the circumstances, it’s logical, if not exactly reasonable, that soon after she steals a car and a gun from her older sister, Darcy, Michelle meets Pink Souder, and then his mother, who, during a visit to the hospital where Michelle’s been taken, miraculously identifies the Jane Doe who’s sharing a room with her, a woman who’s soon reported dead herself. Different readers will decide at different points that there’s never going to be a rational explanation for all the different realities that hover around the cabin on Souder Hill, but Busch keeps the mysterious atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife—not that that would have any lasting effect.
More questions than answers. Lots more.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982585-45-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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