This horror novel follows Alfie and his twin daughters - Sylvie and Cassia - 9 months after his wife's accidental death. What starts as an assumed nightmare of the twins seeing a man in their room evolves into a shared imaginary friend, Alfie reaches out to his wife's sister, Julia. Psychologist Julia initially sees nothing out of the ordinary about the girls' behavior but as she spends more time with the grieving family, memories of her own childhood start surfacing. As the situation with Alfie and the girls start escalating - including hallucinations and physical danger - this friend might be more than imaginary after all.
TW/CW: death of a spouse, death of a parent, suicide, child endangerment, child neglect, domestic violence, miscarriage, grief
The atmosphere of this whole read is spot on. The book opens with heavy grief and even the creepy stuff gets circled back to grief. Yeah, the girls and their imaginary friend are a little weird and something feels off, but they're just grieving the way children do. Or that Alfie is overly sensitive due to his own grief. This is reflected perfectly with the family being basically self-isolated in this old and grand home. As we learn more about the backstory of the home and the events that happened in the past, we can't help but see how that could be impacting the current day story. I'd categorize this read as a pretty quiet, creepy read. We do have some moments of action, but for the most part we're in solid creepy kid story territory.
The horror elements were so delicately balanced, I was surprised that this was a debut. I think it would have been easy for this type of story to get over the top with the horror. And while that might have worked very well also, this sort of more subdued, gently escalating horror was great. Creepy kids are almost always a win and them being twins really was the cherry on top. I liked how we get a mix of them being their usually creepy selves - like seemingly able to communicate telepathically - but then the line gets crossed and now there's maybe something supernatural going on. It felt like the type of horror that I could very well imagine happening in real life where it is just unsettling and strange enough that it makes you wonder but if you aren't a believer in the supernatural/paranormal then you also can come up with explanations for the events.
As far as characters go, this felt very much like a snapshot in time. The majority of the story takes place over a 3 day span, but we do get some flashbacks as well. This short time span didn't give a whole lot of time for much character development. We also see the characters being stagnant due to grief, which also doesn't change a whole lot over 3 days. Friend does a good job of giving us details of these characters through their actions and reactions with other characters. We alternate POVs between Alfie and Julia so we do get their internal dialogue during their chapters. What I absolutely loved is that the children actually read like children. They weren't overly precocious or intellectual for their age and the creepy kid factor then hits that much harder when the kids read as realistic.
I think the ending might be a hit or miss with readers. I found it toeing the line of being frustratingly ambiguous in the same way that the ending of Inception was. We spend this whole book following these characters and seeing the escalation of something that may or may not be supernatural. Then it just sort of ... ends. We do get a epilogue that flashes forward a few months and I found that to also end on sort of an ambiguous note. I think what saved this ending for me was that we have enough textual evidence to support the reading in either direction. I'm certainly swaying in one direction but I can absolutely see the argument for the other reading being the 'real' ending. I also found this ambiguous ending to work well as this theme of trying to figure out what is real or not comes up a lot throughout the book.
Overall, this was a great atmospheric, creepy read. The horror elements were balanced well and the ambiguous ending was pulled off well.
Thanks to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press. Expected publication date is October 3, 2023
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