THE GHOSTS OF BITTERFLY BAY

A young ghost and a living girl face down an evil threat.

First-person narrator Maudie, her little brother, Scratch, and their friend Kit became ghosts almost a year ago. They haunt Mayflower Cottage, a vacation rental near the titular bay of a Canadian lake. They amuse themselves by watching the strange phenomena on their side of “the veil” and playing their “haunting game,” in which they compete to scare visitors away. Then a horror writer and his two daughters arrive to stay in the cottage at the same time that a creepy cabin just…appears on an island in the lake. Shortly after, Scratch and Kit go missing. Convinced that the evil Longfingers—a character from a ghost story she made up—has trapped Scratch and Kit on the island, Maudie reaches through the veil to make contact with Gianna, the author’s younger daughter, for help. As she did in her debut, The Curse of Eelgrass Bog (2024), Averling endows her young protagonist with a mysterious supernatural origin story, a beguilingly weird setting, and an anchoring friend. But this outing feels patched together, the pace muddled and the metaphysics arbitrary and unsatisfying. One of Averling’s strengths is her ear for fresh figurative language, but she kneecaps herself with an overreliance on simile that makes the writing feel stale. Maudie’s an appealing character, but she can’t overcome the story’s weaknesses. Characters present white.

A stumbling second outing.