The darkness runs deep in this skillfully plotted chiller.
A documentarian gets more than she bargains for when she chooses remote Blackwood Bay as the location of her next film.
Alexandra Young’s harrowing first film, Black Winter, won her accolades, but her second film was a failure, and she needs another hit or her career may be in jeopardy. Alex wants to document what life is like in a small village in the north of England by asking people to send in their own footage, which she would then curate. She secures funding, and the people who hold the purse strings coax her into choosing Blackwood Bay, where she spent a troubled childhood, as her subject. She wouldn't have chosen it herself, but with her career on the line, she agrees. It’s also made clear that she’s to look into the suicide of 15-year-old Daisy Willis,who plunged off a cliff to her death a decade ago. Daisy’s body was never found, but suicide was a foregone conclusion. Then, seven years later, Zoe Pearson, another teen, went missing. After the project is announced to Blackwood Bay citizens, the video clips started pouring in. However, to properly look into the disappearances, Alex must travel to Blackwood Bay. She does have faint memories of the town, but now it’s as if she’s “seeing it through a filter, a distorting prism.” As she gathers footage and probes the residents, it’s clear that some people don’t believe Daisy killed herself and that the incident could be connected to Zoe’s disappearance. Alex doesn’t quite see how the two could be related, but she does sense an insidious rot lingering under the coastal town’s quaint facade. When another teen girl goes missing, the town is looking for someone to blame, and no one is safe, not even Alex. Before she knows it, Alex is no longer a passive observer: She’s part of the story. Watson gradually turns up the heat while carefully teasing out wicked secrets that the town would rather keep buried, and Alex, who has her own secrets, makes an appealing, if possibly unreliable, narrator.
The darkness runs deep in this skillfully plotted chiller.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06238-215-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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