This horror story follows Kit Lamb during her last summer before college. She's on her school's basketball team and on the night before the big game, one of the other players tells a ghost story about Daphne to the team. There are different versions of Daphne's story - some say she was murdered, some say she was a murderer - but the main theme is that if you think about her, she will come and kill you. After hearing this story, Kit can't stop thinking about Daphne. And once her teammates start dying one by one, Kit begins to suspect Daphne might be real after all. Now, Kit is determined to find the truth behind the legend and learn to face her own fears before its too late.
TW/CW: child abduction, child murder, cannibalism, suicide, anxiety, body horror
I've really enjoyed all of my past Malerman reads, but this one started out a little rough. Looking back, I just think the point he chose to start the story at was not the most interesting and ended up making the pacing feel really disjointed. However, once the kills start, they don't stop and this turned into a really great read. I did read an ARC copy, so there's a chance some of this could change in the final version. The story opens at the end of the big game and has Kit thinking about Daphne and her inner monologue does a great job at showing the reader how nervous and anxious she is about Daphne. Only one problem: the reader doesn't have any context to who Daphne is or why Kit is thinking about her. Now, of course, if you read the book description, you would have an idea but the lack of story context was really throwing me off. The reader then gets filled in via flashback but this pacing and structure just didn't work for me. Once we get past this awkward beginning, I really enjoyed the pacing and structure for the rest of the story.
I really loved the Daphne myth and how it evolved over the course of the book. Having it be a ghost story at a sleepover really made it feel universal because I think many people will have a similar ghost story in their area. I also enjoyed having the main characters be older and having this play between them thinking ghosts aren't real but also all sort of believing in them. At first, I thought this would just be a regular sort of vague ghost story, but I was really pleased with how detailed the story got and how we could see it change as it was told. Daphne's myth also got a lot darker than I was expecting which I appreciated.
Anxiety is a big theme in the book and I thought making Daphne be a sort of mirror for that worked really well. In the acknowledgements at the end, Malerman talks a bit about his own anxiety journey and how some of that is reflected in Kit. We see a wide range of Kit's anxiety and her coping strategies and the narrative style in these sections really reflects her mental state. These sections, especially her journal entries, feel very stream of consciousness but there's this constant reminder of Daphne that comes through and it really feels like she pops up in Kit's mind. I struggle with anxiety at times, but not at the level that Kit does and I think the narrative style choices do a great job of letting readers into that struggle who might not otherwise understand the feeling. There are one or two brief moments where Kit thinks that if she committed suicide that she wouldn't have to live with this anxiety anymore so that may be upsetting to folks who
Despite these characters being in high school, I don't think they necessarily read like they're that young. This book really has Malerman's voice in the prose and I really enjoy his writing style. However, for readers who really like the characters to feel very realistic and have distinct voices, I don't think this would necessarily fit that category. Because Malerman's voice is so present, it feels like the story is being told by someone watching these characters from above so there is a level of disconnect. While we do get some inner monologue and some of Kit's journal entries, I didn't feel like these differed enough from character to character and they had the same tone as the overall description narration. This is 100% a personal preference thing and while I do normally prefer when the author sort of disappears and lets the characters shine, I do think Malerman is one exception for me.
The kills in this were great and we get a good number of them on-page. There's a slight escalation with each death in either timing, place, or brutality that works really well to up the tension. As the story progresses and more bodies drop, there's this frantic aspect to the police investigation and town overall and it was such a great way to keep up the pacing.
The ending was a bit abrupt, which I normally don't like, but in this case, I didn't mind. It felt like the puzzle pieces came together early enough that there was sufficient time for the resolution to play out. I also think the main questions got answered enough that the usual post-climax reflection/info dump wasn't necessary. There were a few details that, at first, I thought didn't get fleshed out enough but upon reflection I could answer all the questions I had. There are a number of threads that come together really well at the end and I think they wrap the whole story up nicely.
Overall, this was a fantastic read. Got off to a bit of a slow start, but once the story picked up, it really went full speed ahead. Great myth, great kills, and excellent building of tension as the story went on.
Thanks NetGalley and Del Ray books for the ARC
Expected publication date is September 20, 2022
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