This supernatural horror follows Margot Hull as she returns to her childhood home for the first time in a decade. After the death of her estranged parents, Margot inherits the family home and world-famous winery on Gallows Hill. Margot, with the help of the winery employees, starts to learn about Gallows Hill's dark and bloody history as she tries to decide what to do with this new life she wasn't expecting. But when she's alone in the house at night, Margot is forced to confront that past history face to face and she realizes she may be the next victim of Gallows Hill.
TW/CW: parental abandonment, death of a parent, animal death
This might be the scariest book I've ever read and I absolutely loved it. There's something about these gothic haunted house horror stories that just gets into my brain and hits my overactive imagination just right. This is my first read by Coates but it 100% will not be the last. I absolutely loved her writing style, descriptions, and the way they came together to really sink me deep into the story. Coates has my absolutely favorite writing style where it feels like the words melt away and a movie starts playing in my head while I read. And for someone with medium-severe level aphantasia is really saying something. I also know that this writing style seems, on the surface, as very simple and easy but there's significant skill involved in crafting the sentences and scenes so it doesn't even feel like I'm reading.
I really loved the setting and lore behind Gallows Hill. I feel like for these gothic/haunted house stories, the setting is foundational to setting up the rest of the story. The name alone is absolute perfection as far as simply setting a certain mood. The name, along with the cover art, made me picture a sort of Tim Burton-esque set up with this creepy house at the top of a hill that the whole town whispers about. I loved the way the history of this location was sprinkled in throughout the first 50%ish of the book so we didn't have one big info dump. Margot learns new details about Gallows Hill as each of these new strange events occurs. We do have a pretty well developed cast of characters that help Margot get answers to some of her questions (but for most of the tense moments, Margot is alone). I loved the way we get pieces and layers of the lore throughout the story and they all come together perfectly at the end.
The horror elements in this were fantastic and I loved the way they were balanced and paced throughout the book. I was expecting this to be more of a slow burn gothic horror but we get some really great build up very quickly in the story. But these moments are well balanced with the outside narrative of Margot trying to figure out this new situation she finds herself in when it comes to this new business and figuring out if she wants to live in this new house permanently. There are also some really great internal logic of the horror elements that allowed the story to have these natural ebbs and flows of the tense moments which really helped the overall pacing. Coates also knows exactly when to drop those particular lines that immediately jack up the tension and scares 200% (I almost threw the book across the room at the doggie door line - iykyk). I read this book at night when my boyfriend was out of the house and I had to turn on a podcast in the background so I wouldn't feel so alone because I was getting so freaked out.
As with many haunted house stories, there's a bit of a mystery element to this one where Margot is trying to figure out what really happened in this house hundreds of years before and how that might connect with what is happening now. I really enjoyed how the mystery investigation was handled and how well it was mixed in with the escalating horror scenes. I also appreciated that the ending was not a Scooby-Doo type ending where the ending deflated the scares and horror that had been building throughout the story. Instead, we do get answers and the answers elevated the horror elements for me. I do wish the mystery was introduced a little earlier because it did feel a little rushed at the end and I think if the same plot points were just spread out a little more it would have worked a bit better.
I do wish Margot was a more developed character when it came to her life before coming to Gallows Hill. We get some details about her life but it felt more like a bullet point list of facts about Margot rather than a well-rounded character shown to us on page. Since Margot has some pretty intense family stuff intertwined with suddenly dealing with this creepy house, I think some of the reveals later on would have hit way harder, emotionally, if we had a better sense of who Margot was before. Maybe if the story was a little slower burn in the beginning so we could really spend some time with Margot settling into this new life while processing her complicated family background.
Thanks NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the ARC. Publication date was September 6, 2022
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