WHEN I CAST YOUR SHADOW

Porter (Vassa in the Night, 2016, etc.) presents a ghost story in which the dead wait on the far side of dreams.

Dashiell, a white boy with irresistible gray eyes and strawberry-gold hair, is two months dead. His younger siblings, 16-year-old twins Ruby and Everett, also white but not nearly so beautiful, know this, but they’re also starting to realize that he isn’t actually gone. He’s come back for them. Ruby would do anything to get her beloved older brother back, but Everett isn’t quite sure where he stands; both must examine whether Dashiell is a danger to them—and perhaps always was. They also have to decide who they are in relation to the force he’s forever been in their lives. The story’s uneven, with prose that sometimes moves from poetic to overwrought and characters that vacillate between compelling and absurd. Nevertheless, it delivers a deliciously disturbing and engaging portrait of the complexities of familial love and takes readers to the boundaries between innocence and corruption, self-preservation and sacrifice, the dreaming and the dead. Alternating first-person chapters (including all three siblings and the voice of the villain, among others) aid in portraying the nuances at play.

A haunting tale of possession that explores the ghostly landscape of dreams and nightmares—but more importantly, the particular dynamics among siblings, both oppressive and redemptive.