This supernatural/creature horror follows 10 year old Stevie as his cousin (and best friend) Jude goes missing. Stevie and Jude spend all their free time together, running through the woods surrounding the town of Deer Valley, Oregon. Stevie is convinced Jude just got sidetracked and is working on a fort or something in the woods. However, when the days start to pass with no sign of Jude, Stevie starts to get worried, especially when the town starts to whisper of another boy who disappeared years prior - only a pile of gnawed on bones left of him. The inhabitants of Deer Valley have always known their town was a little off, but they mostly shrug it off. Stevie is determined to find out what really happened to Jude and in doing so, he just might find out more than he bargained for.
TW/CW: animal death, death of a child, death of a parent, kidnapping, miscarriage, pregnancy, domestic abuse, blood/gore, mental illness
This was my first read from Ahlborn but it won't be my last. This book worked for me in basically every way and as this is one of her lower-rated books on Goodreads (3.63/5 average), I'm excited to read more from her soon. I always like to read through reviews when I've finished a book and there were two main points that kept coming up in reviews that were lower-rated - Stevie's character being annoying and the Part 2 storyline being cliche. For both of these, I can see why some readers would say that but those aspects really worked for me (as I'll explain later).
The characters and narrative voice really go hand in hand in this story. It is told in 3rd person POV and, for the majority of the time, we are following Stevie very closely. However, as it is 3rd person, we do hop around a bit and follow some of the other characters. This hopping does cause a bit of a disconnect, at times, but really just took some getting used to on my part. Since we are following Stevie so closely, we get a lot of information filtered through a 10-year old boy's perspective. For example, Stevie goes to the movie with his older brother and his brother's girlfriend who end up doing some hand-sexy-times in the theater. Stevie can see, but doesn't know exactly what is going on so he describes his brother 'adjusting himself' as if his pants were too tight. Stevie also has a history of some sort of un-diagnosed mental illness or medical condition. We are told he had occasional hallucinations and has verbal ticks such as repeating himself or speaking in rhyme, especially in moments of high emotion. That, combined with the usual overactive imagination of a 10 year old boy, makes Stevie a somewhat unreliable narrator. His emotional responses to situations can feel very over-the-top and he has a very child-like disposition of not being able to understand the 'why' behind certain decisions. For example, when his mom doesn't want him talking to a certain character because Stevie might upset them if he asks too many questions. Stevie thinks that the character should want to talk to him about what happened because his mom always says it is good to talk about hard things. This disconnect between the reader and Stevie can make the narration and some of Stevie's choices come off as annoying.
The pacing and structure of the book was a little slow in the first 1/3 but picked up after that. There's a good amount of set up and repetition in that first section where we're seeing Stevie and how he experiences the world and Jude going missing. I think this beginning is really where Stevie only being 10 years old is a bit of a hindrance to the overall story because he (and, as a result, the reader) aren't getting a lot of details about Jude's disappearance or how the search is going. We see Stevie asking a lot of questions, but not getting a lot of answers. He somewhat starts investigating, but hits some pretty significant walls early on that an older character probably wouldn't have. Then, once the pacing starts picking up with some big reveals, everything grids to a halt when we get Part 2 of the book which switches away from Stevie to a whole new POV. Initially, I was annoyed at this switch because it is coming 1/3 of the way through the book with no previous indication that this would be a dual POV read. I love dual POVs, but I was already so set in Stevie's POV that this Part 2 really threw me off. However, this Part 2 really kicked off pretty quickly and I could see how it would tie back to Stevie eventually. I think the choice to have Part 2 POV shift so dramatically paid off in the end, but in the moment it really killed any forward momentum we had with Stevie.
The horror elements were fantastic. I really loved the gradual shift from the horror being unknown and possibly not even real to being so incredibly vivid. I think Ahlborn did a great job taking those pretty standard kid-level fears of shadows in the dark or the one creepy house in town and really elevating them to the next level. Sure, the storyline introduced in Part 2 of the book has been done before and even as someone new-ish to the genre, I could list off a handful of other examples of that same storyline. From reading reviews, some readers were looking for more originality from this plot aspect and were disappointed. Maybe it is just because I don't read/watch horror widely, but I thought the focus being on Stevie for the majority of the book was a bit of a new twist on this particular trope. I also think seeing this particular trope in an extended timeline type situation was new enough to pique my interest. In my (limited) experience, this trope is usually cut off at a certain point (I can't elaborate due to spoilers). However, in this case, we see how this trope might look in the time after that very popular cutoff point and I liked that exploration. There is a good amount of pretty descriptive animal deaths in the book which, for me, were getting close to bordering on excessive. It didn't quite tip too far, but there's a particular aspect of the animal deaths/maiming that becomes important to the plot later and I think I just picked up on that aspect pretty early on so I didn't quite see the point to continuously showing this on page. However, the characters in the story need some more time to put together what, exactly, is going on so we keep getting these details until everyone has caught on. The escalation of these more gory elements did up the tension and stakes for our characters which, once we're in the last 10% of the story, really made it so I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.
Oof, that ending. I've been gradually reading more horror and the endings are almost always a gut-punch. I read so much romance (where there's always a happy ending) or thriller/mysteries (where there is, most likely, a happy-ish ending). So when I do read a horror (which almost never has what can be called even remotely a 'happy' ending), I find myself hoping that the last 10% of the book isn't going where I think it is going. This was no exception. I kept checking the % at the bottom of my tablet, hoping there was enough book left for everything to work out okay. It didn't end up going exactly where I thought it was, but it ended in a much more heart wrenching way than I was expecting. While the book ended exactly how it needed to end, it wasn't, necessarily, satisfying in an emotional way like I was hoping for - but it was satisfying from a plot perspective. The epilogue was the perfect way to wrap up some loose ends and give the reader some context as to what happened in the years after the main events. There are some questions that never get answered, which may annoy some readers. There was also a moment in the epilogue that really opened up the ending to maybe some different interpretations which I really liked. This really felt like the type of ending where you want to find people who also read it to see what they thought of it.
Overall, this was a great read for me. Maybe some very seasoned horror readers would find it a bit unoriginal but I was invested pretty much from the beginning. The opening 1/3 is a bit slow, but things ramp up quickly after that. I loved Stevie as our protagonist and loved watching him come to realize and understand, as much as he could, what is happening in his town. Great horror elements and I really couldn't imagine a more appropriate ending than what we got.
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