Such a Pretty Smile - Kristi DeMeester

 

This horror/thriller follows mother and daughter Caroline and Lila Sawyer.  In Atlanta, Georgia, girls have gone missing only for their mutilated bodies to be found days later. They are more suspected victims of the killer known as The Cur who has killed in multiple states over multiple decades.  We follow the dual timelines of Caroline (New Orleans in 2004) and Lila (Atlanta in 2019) as both deal with this threat in their lives as well as being terrorized by nightmares, delusions, and the unyielding feeling of being watched and followed.  Caroline has tried her best to protect her daughter from the threats that she feared followed her from New Orleans to Atlanta.  But now that Lila is 13 and starting to rebel against her mother's rules, the two must dig through Caroline's past and figure out what connections there are to the present day.  

TW/CW: intrusive thoughts, mental illness, child death, animal death, child abduction 

This was an intense read, but I really loved it. This was, for me, psychological horror at its best.  The gradual building and expanding of the horror elements as the story progressed were absolutely spot on.  I really enjoyed the creeping way the horror edged in from the outside until the characters couldn't escape from it.  This gradual escalation also made it hard to tell what was real and what wasn't in this story - for both the reader and the characters - so by the midpoint, we were pretty solidly into unreliable narrator-land.  I especially loved how the beginning horror elements were small enough that I think most readers could identify with - for example: brief intrusive thoughts about how you wished you could just tell your friend to "shut up already" before immediately correcting and briefly wondering why you would think something like that.  I think starting horror novels with smaller horror like that (as opposed to jumping in the deep end) really helps with reader buy-in and getting readers to stay with the book as it goes deeper and more sinister from there.  

I do want to mention that the most extreme parts of the horror are attributed to the main character's mental illness that was, until this point, undiagnosed.  We see this character dealing with these new aspects to their reality as they get more and more extreme until they finally are forced to seek help and get a diagnosis.  I personally do not have the specific mental illness in this story so I can't speak to the representation but from how the book came across to me, it seemed like DeMeester walked the line between a couple of tropes very carefully.  It isn't for me to determine if that was successful or not, but I did feel like she was aware of the stereotypes that many books fall into and she tried to work around those.  Most of the violence and gore was off page with only descriptions given after the fact so this story was really set in the mind of our characters and about how they're experiencing things in their world.  I think this made for a very immersive and emotional read and I can only imagine would hit even harder for someone who does have the particular mental illness portrayed in this story. 

The pacing of this story was phenomenal.  It is told in dual timeline and as the story progresses and the two plot lines start to converge, the chapters start alternating more and more quickly from one timeline to the other.  DeMeester does a great job at really settling the reader into the story initially and then she starts throwing escalating plot points and emotional moments at the reader.  Once the story really kicks into high gear (for me, around the 50% mark) there wasn't a whole lot of downtime between plot point reveals and the escalating horror elements.  I think if this book was any longer, that would have been a problem.  Looking back at my reading experience, there were times in the last 25% of the book where it really felt like I couldn't read fast enough and while that is a really thrilling reading experience, I do think it lowered my reading comprehension because I was reading so fast to get to the next plot point that some of the deeper themes didn't have time to sink in.  I don't often re-read books, even years later, but I think this book has a really great re-read potential because of all the theme layers combined with the incredible plot. I can absolutely see how some readers won't enjoy that sort of constant acceleration reading experience but I had a really great time with it.

I thought the characters and their relationships were really well done.  So much of this story revolves around relationships and tensions between a parent and child that these connections in the story really needed to be solid. The plot did not have a whole lot of time to dillydally around but DeMeester does a great job of drilling down and giving us a handful of key scenes and interactions so we are well-grounded in the reality of these relationships.  In the opening scene, for example, we see Lila's feelings about her relationship with her mom, dad, and best friend as well as her feelings on the tension between her parents and the tension between her friend and her mom.  

The one aspect of this book that I wasn't 100% sold on was Lila's voice.  She did not read to me as a 13 year old, she came across more like a 15/16 year old.  So much so that when we're in the climax of the book and she needs to travel, I was surprised for a moment that she didn't have a drivers license but then I remembered she is only 13.  There were some points that came across as very authentic 13 year old girl like how she's handling her crushes and how she's trying to break apart from her mom a bit to be more independent.  However, a lot of the inner monologue that we get from her feels really overly complex and made the character read older than I would have expected.  The story is told in third person, but has a close narration style so we get inner thoughts of both Caroline and Lila and the narration style and language used for both characters was the same so it made Lila read older for me.  I don't think this was detrimental to the story overall, but it did cause me to pause at a few places and take me out of the story a bit while reading. 

The ending to this story is one of those endings that is a little open and I know that is hit or miss with readers.  We get some details that show us the world isn't entirely what we thought it was but we don't really get any sort of concrete, sit-down explanation that X was A and Y was B, etc.  We get enough resolution and a snapshot of the future so we know how certain characters end up and how they are coping with the information we learned in the climax.  Throughout the story, DeMeester does a great job of layering in some social commentary about growing up as a woman and all the different ways girls can fight against aspects or forces in their lives that are trying to make them be less, make them be quiet.  I think this is the type of book, for me, that I need another read through to really grasp these commentary layers.  I can see they are there but upon first read through, I was so caught up in the literal plot points of the story that I think some of those deeper layers didn't get as much brain-time from me as they should.  I have a feeling (that looks to be confirmed by other reviews) that if I had grasped these extra layers better then the ending wouldn't feel as open as I think it came off to me.  

Overall, this was a fantastic horror read that had some great layering of social commentary I would like to revisit. Phenomenal pacing, horror, and characters. The ending I think will be a pinch point for some readers and the pacing could be considered overwhelming at times.  I'm not sure how the mental illness aspects will land with readers more closely tied to those than I am, so a note of caution going forward on that point.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC

Expected publication date is January 18, 2022