The perfect tale for fans of horror with heart.
A door to another world appears in a museum of oddities, but it’s no gateway to Narnia.
Rudderless after her divorce and terrified at the prospect of moving back in with her parents, 34-year-old Kara returns to where she grew up, quaint Hog Chapel, North Carolina, to stay with her beloved, kindly Uncle Earl, who calls her Carrot and owns the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy. The museum is chock full of taxidermic animals (and more fantastical creatures) and an assortment of other strange and wondrous items, including a grizzled tabby cat named Beau, who keeps the mice from ravaging the exhibits. It doesn’t take long for Kara to settle in, and she earns her keep by cataloging the museum’s collection. After hours, she enjoys hanging out with the gregarious (and often top-hatted) Simon, who works at the Black Hen coffee shop next door and regales Kara with outrageous stories from his Florida childhood. When Earl is hospitalized for knee surgery, Kara happily takes over the day-to-day work at the museum and enlists Simon’s help in patching a significant hole in the building’s drywall. Curiosity gets the best of Kara and Simon when they discover a dark corridor behind the hole, which leads to a door to an otherworldly place where willows whisper with the promise of horrors that soon threaten to spill out into Kara’s world. Luckily, Kara has Simon and maybe even a bit of help from some of the museum’s inhabitants. There are no cheap scares here, and while a few are Lovecraft-ian in flavor, they’re entirely of the author’s wonderfully twisted and endlessly fertile imagination, and readers will have no trouble rooting for the instantly likable Kara, who narrates, and the delightfully offbeat Simon.
The perfect tale for fans of horror with heart.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5112-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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