The Children on the Hill - Jennifer McMahon

 

This horror/suspense, inspired by Frankenstein, follows a group of siblings starting in 1978.  Siblings Vi and Eric live with their grandmother on the grounds of her renowned psychiatric treatment center in rural Vermont.  Then Gran brings home another girl one day - Iris - and she joins Vi and Eric on their adventures.  Outside of homeschooling, caring for their pets, and exploring the grounds, the siblings also have the Monster Club. This club is where they categorize information on all types of monsters, including how to defeat them because, as Vi explains, monsters are everywhere.  Now, in 2019, the host of popular monster-hunting podcast, Lizzy Shelley, is on her way to Vermont.  A girl has disappeared from a small town and rumor is that the local monster took her.  Where the police are sure the girl just ran away, Lizzy knows some monsters are real and one is her sister.

TW/CW: medical experimentation, eugenics, abduction, arson, animal death

I really loved the characters and their dynamic.  And as someone who normally finds almost all children in fiction annoying, that is really saying something.  I loved Vi, Eric, and Iris and McMahon does a fantastic job of introducing the reader to their dynamic and their whole world of imagination.  The side characters were also really well done, especially since we get them from the Vi's POV so they were maybe a bit more like caricatures (the grumpy lady working the front desk, for example).  Lizzy was an instantly compelling character for me, since she's a grown adult who genuinely believes in these monster hunts she's going on.  I loved her lone-wolf attitude but then how she could flip on the charm and get information out of people for these investigations.  These were the types of characters who we know must have had very interesting lives and I wouldn't be mad if we could read more of those earlier bits (I want to see Lizzy hunt down all the monsters!)

I think the dual timeline aspect worked well but it was a situation where I was much more interested in one timeline over the other.  This felt like a 70/30 split between the 1978 timeline following Vi and the 2019 timeline following Lizzy - I was much more interested in the 2019 events.  Looking back at the chapter titles in the ebook, I was suprised that it was split nearly 50/50: Vi has 19 chapters and Lizzy has 17 chapters (however, I didn't go back through the whole book to count pages).  Maybe readers who prefer Vi's chapters in 1978 will feel differently than I did about the balance between the two timelines. I so badly wanted to follow Lizzy as she hunted this monster and I loved the chapters we get from 2019.  McMahon did a great job of linking the two timelines by having something come up in one that we then see mirrored in the other timeline.  I always appreciate when authors do this because it does help the story feel like a more cohesive whole.  We also get, mostly later on in the story, some excerpts from articles that allude to some tragedy and I really wanted more of those.  They very much felt like an easy way to get some information to the reader that our POV characters might not know about. I think these breaks helped remind the reader that we were working toward something bad and it helped to re-up the tension when it had been a bit more relaxed.

I found the ending to be a bit anti-climactic, mostly due to the pacing.  The build up was fantastic but when the final reveal comes, it is cleaned up so quickly and cleanly that it didn't give me enough time to really sink into the situation.  I loved the plot points on paper, but I just wanted one of the last scenes to last longer and have the main conflict resolution be handled in a more complex way.  I think the way this ending reveal was handled then made the final twist, again, less impactful overall.  I wanted a bigger build up, more conflict, and higher stakes than what we ended up getting but since I didn't have any problems with the actual plot points themselves, I think this might just be a me-issue.  If I'm putting my ex-English major hat on, I think that this quick clean up of the main climax sort of mirrors the earlier discussions in the books about monsters and their inevitable fate.  We, the reader, have been trained by years of reading and watching these type of 'monster' stories that we're fully aware of how these ending climaxes usually turn out.  However, the subversion of this was really interesting and while it was maybe less satisfying from a gut-reaction sort of lens, I can admit that it is more interesting from a thematic analysis. 

I loved the way the horror is implemented in this story.  We know from the description of the book that this was Frankenstein-inspired and I think that comes across very obviously.  I could see some readers finding this a bit too heavy-handed, but I thought the references were earned well enough in the world of the story that I didn't have a problem.  I also think readers who aren't familiar with Frankenstein will have no problems following along.  At first, I thought maybe we'd just be more in the psychological/philosophical horror realm and discuss what being a 'monster' really means and how one's identity can impact their lives.  And, to be fair, we for sure get some of those themes, but I was glad that we get a bit more into the medical/science type horror as we get into the later part of the book.  I read Frankenstein in my college Gothic Literature course and I absolutely loved it, so I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it already. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this read and found it much more compelling than I was expecting.  I do wish the dual timelines were balanced a little differently and that the ending pacing was tweaked, but otherwise this was a really fun time. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the ARC

Expected publication date is April 26, 2022