The Lodge - Jeremy Eads

 

"A demon runs a bed and breakfast in southwest Virginia where sin never needs a reservation. A guilt-ridden retiree, two little boys, and a pair of meth making cousins will challenge America's most wanted black widow, a haunted southern town, and the Devil himself. The quest for salvation will lead to the darkest parts of themselves as well as the beating black heart of Summit Valley, Virginia. The Maple Lodge, a B&B where the turn down service is to die for."

 

 This horror read took me a little while to find my footing, but once I figured out what the story actually was, I absolutely loved it. This, for me, was very much a 'let it cook' type of book where you just keep turning the pages and slowly the deeper plot comes through. At first, we were changing characters so many times that I thought these were just little glimpses into this world. But once the characters start recurring and interacting with each other, then I knew there was more going on and the last 25% was a great ride.

We are following multiple characters throughout the book and Eads did a great job of giving each character a distinctive voice that helped me keep all the different plot threads straight.  Given how many characters we interact with across only a 250-ish page book, I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of character development Eads was able to fit in.  I had a good grasp on each character and their specific desires and life situations. 

The horror elements were fantastic and surprising.  The horrific parts were sprinkled in and not overused at all.  A lot of the tension I found while reading was when characters were flirting near the edge of the danger without knowing it.  When we do see the horrors of the lodge on paper, they are always shown through the character experiencing it so it felt extra horrific as many times they couldn't fully comprehend the gravity of the situation they were in.  We get a good mix of gore, supernatural, and psychological horror - all used expertly.  

Overall, this was a great horror story that I loved the more I read.  The horror elements were used masterfully and the care that Eads took with crafting the characters just meant that I was that much more invested when it was their turn to face the horrors of the Lodge.

 Thanks to NetGalley and Wicked House Publishing for the ARC.  

Publication date was July 28, 2023 

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix

 

This book is exactly what you think it is.  A suburban woman's book club that must protect their community from a vampire.  Literally.  We follow Patricia, a former nurse and now stay at home mom, as she navigates the community in the new town her family has moved to.  This seemingly perfect town outside Charleston, South Carolina has been a life goal but now that she's achieved it, she is faced with the reality of a distant husband, cranky teenage kids, and a constant revolving list of chores.  Her one reprieve is the local book club that reads true-crime and thrillers - a true escape from her otherwise boring life.  Boring, that is, until a tall, dark, and handsome stranger comes to town and charms everyone.  But when children start going missing, Patricia and the book club must gather up the strength to fight for her family and her community.

This book was released about a year ago and was one of the most talked about books in the bookish circles I follow.  It sounded really interesting and I was pretty convinced I would love it but it was so hyped up that I just couldn't bring myself to actually pick it up.  As a personal rule with any media (movies, TV shows, books, etc), if something is so widely talked about and so widely loved, I wait at least 6 months to let the hype die down.  I don't enjoy having my expectations set so high that the actual product would be an almost guaranteed let down. So I put this book on my TBR list and went about my life until enough time had passed that I felt I could give the book an honest chance.  Am I a year late to the party? Yep. Do I regret it? Nope.  Because this book ended up really working for me on almost every point.  But it wasn't exactly what I was expecting from all the hype so I think if I had read it a year ago, I think I would have ended up liking it but being disappointed overall.  However, giving it the chance to breathe means this book is probably making my top list of favorites for the year.  

The characters were my absolutely favorite parts of this book.  There are a lot of characters, which I normally struggle with, but they were all so distinct and filled particular roles in the story that I was able to keep everyone straight and I didn't feel like there were unnecessary characters just floating about.  Patricia is our main character and the book club and her family are the main secondary characters that we get the most information about.  Then we have the book club member's families and other neighbors that Patricia interacts with on occasion who aren't really fleshed out more than their relationship and maybe their job.  Since we are centered on Patricia for the story and it is told in third person close perspective, most of the information we have about other characters are based on what she sees or knows about them which was really interesting.  I did like how, throughout the course of the story, we got character development from all the women in the book club and while, at times, the development was frustrating to read about, I think all the characters stayed wholly authentic to their own arcs.  We start off with Patricia being a bit judgemental about the other women and how they handle themselves but as she becomes better friends, they really start to feel like a support system and not just neighborhood acquaintances.

The overall plot and themes the book explored were also fantastic.  In a forward at the beginning, Hendrix explains how he thought of the idea for the book and the part that stuck with me was the line about how he wanted to see his mom vs Dracula - it was such a great image to keep in mind when reading the book.  I find horror books fascinating on a thematic level because they are often lenses through which we can explore deep fears, either personal fears or societal fears. In the case of this story, we see examples of white, upper class people wanting to use their privilege for good until those actions would threaten their own life.  There's a really interesting exploration and examination of what it means to be an 'outsider' or and 'other' in communities.  These themes are laid out, but Hendrix isn't super heavy handed with them so they didn't distract from the overall enjoyment of the book.  Instead, the book leaves room for reader introspection and, toward the end, we can see the result and 'lessons' the characters learned through how the events of the book were handled.  I think these sorts of themes are most often talked about in books that get labeled as 'hard hitting contemporaries' and while all genres can have lesson or explorations of themes in them, I don't think examples like this book are talked about nearly as much.  And maybe that's because a smaller number of readers would pick up a book about vampires if they wanted a sort of social commentary type of reading experience or maybe because the lessons on how to act when a vampire comes to town aren't as immediately applicable to daily life. And even if we were to leave the themes out of the discussion, the plot of the book was great.  It was a fun ride and had enough secondary plot points and arcs that I was always engaged with the story.

The one aspect of this book that I didn't really like was the pacing in the second part of the book. There are a number of time jumps in the book, usually just skipping forward a month to the next book club meeting.  However, there is one larger jump in the middle of the book where we jump years into the future.  I get that this jump allowed us to see the extent of the results from the first half of the book.  We see how Patricia acts now and her relationships with her children and we see how the community has accepted and embraced this stranger and how he's helping their businesses.  So on a conceptual level, I understand it, but from a reader perspective, I wanted to see all of that development.  Patricia is a pretty broken person on the inside but she's putting on a good show for all these people and I wanted to see how she got to that point.  It felt like we had missed out on a lot of character growth for many of the characters and were just told that things are different now because of X.  But I wanted to see those gradual changes in attitudes and personal relationships.  The fact that the change was so sudden took me out of the story for a while and I had to readjust my perceptions and understanding of these characters before I could get completely immersed back into the story.  I would have preferred if we had a few smaller jumps of maybe 4 months at a time so the reader could have seen these changes and how they came about and how other characters reacted at the time. 

Finally, I do want to mention how perfectly bloody this book was for me.  I know that every person has their own personal limits to how much they can tolerate when it comes to blood and gore but I found that this book really had a perfect mix of psychological horror and physical horror.  I found this story to be like 85% psychological horror where we're following Patricia as she's working on her theories to what could be happening in her area and grappling with how absurd the information she's finding out actually is.  However, in that other 15%, Hendrix is pretty brutal in all the best ways.  The bloody scenes were very action heavy which I think ended up working very well so the gore never felt really overdone or like some sort of B-movie bloodbath.  I found these scenes to be dynamic and very clear on who was doing what and where everyone was so I was able to stay in the story and didn't have to re-read sections to figure out what was going on.  We get two main bloody scenes in the first 1/3 of the book and then we settle into Patricia's investigation and mostly some creepy psychological stuff happening.  The book finishes, however, with a real banger of a bloodbath.  Without getting into spoilers, I'll just say that I was both surprised and ecstatic that Hendrix went there with the ending - this is a vampire story afterall.

Overall, I absolutely loved this book - well rounded characters, suspenseful plot, balance of blood vs psychological horror.  Pacing in the second part of the book was a little bit of a miss for me, but didn't hinder my enjoyment overall too much.

Mexican Gothic - Silvia Moreno-Garcia

 

 

Set in 1950s Mexico, this story follows debutante Noemí as she travels to a house in the Mexican countryside after receiving a mysterious and somewhat cryptic letter from her cousin who had recently married.  When she arrives, she meets the English family her cousin has married into who try to convince Noemí that her cousin is sick but getting better with the help of the family doctor from town.  However, Noemí is not one to let a matter remain unsettled and the more time she spends in this house, the more she uncovers about the family, their history, and the dark secrets the walls are hiding. **CW/TW for the book are at the end of the review**

I absolutely loved this book and it is pretty much my perfect gothic horror book.  I took a Gothic Literature class in college and this book would be perfectly at home in the syllabus for that class.  I loved that it was set in the 1950s in a rural area which really heightened the isolation elements of the story.  The majority of the story is a very atmospheric build-up as Noemí tries to help her cousin and at the same time is doing her best to abide by the strange rules in this home.  Everyone at the house feels off and the rules, such as no talking at the dining table, add to the mysterious vibe of the whole situation.  Noemí, to her credit is not one to shy away from the situation and she tries her best to take control and advocate for her cousin (and herself).  As the story progresses, Noemí learns more and more about the family's history and the horror elements ramp up as she learns more details.  There are spots of more pronounced horror in Noemí's nightmares that she has while staying at the house but the book goes full-tilt at about the 25% mark when we find out all the information and the book doesn't hold back.  I've seen some reviews that say this book felt more like a suspense rather than a horror and I could see how if they were expecting a more intense or visceral sort of horror experience that this isn't the book they were expecting.  However, I went in expecting a gothic horror and I got exactly what I wanted (plus a little extra I wasn't expecting).

The character work in this book was really fantastic.  I found all the main players to be really well developed and complex - especially our protagonist, Noemí.  The summary from Goodreads describes her as "a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid".  She's wonderfully complex and I love that the book starts out with her in her element in Mexico City's social scene.  We see the glamorous side of her but almost immediately after, we see her drive to follow her own path in life when she tries to explain to her father why she wants to go to university.  Many of her interactions with other characters have them not exactly underestimating her, but they obviously expect her to act in a certain way and she does act that way until there's a reason for her not to.  Our other significant characters are just as nuanced.  I really liked how the characters all have their main facade they use for most interactions and slowly those fronts crumble as the story progresses.  I really like complicated and nuanced characters and I found these characters fascinating even during the quieter build up of the story.

 The one part of the book I was a bit irked by was one specific part of the ending.  I obviously don't want to go into too much detail but, in general, there were a few too many situations where one character would sort of out-maneuver another character.  They they would say "you thought you would do X without me knowing?  I knew all along and I laid this trap for you to fall right into!".  Once is a good twist, but it happened two or three times at varying degrees of significance and by the end I was just waiting for someone else to pop up from behind a couch or something to surprise the other characters.  I've heard some people express that the ending dragged on a bit too long for them after the big reveal and I'm wondering if this type of repetition of plot twists could have been a factor for those readers.  

I really enjoyed the amount of agency Noemí has in the book.  I was expecting, based on the time period and general gothic horror tropes, that she would be much more of a passive character bordering on victim.  However, she shows pretty much from the beginning that she is not going to let other people decide what she is going to do.  And we see this part of her personality come through in multiple facets of her life including her university studies, romantic relationships, trying to help her cousin, and ultimately discovering the truth behind what has been happening in the village.  There's a plot point that comes up as part of the big reveal that very easily could have taken away Noemí's agency and she would have easily ended up being a broken victim.  However, she takes all the spirit and resolve that we've seen developing throughout the whole book and fights back against the big bad - not only for herself, but for the people she cares about as well.  I think the balance between her acting 'properly' and then her standing up for herself is really well done.  There are multiple occasions where Noemí uses her family's status in society and her knowledge of delicate social situations to her advantage.  She tells the reader that she needs to act this way in order to accomplish X and Y later and every time it happened, I just found myself thinking "go get 'em, Noemí, they won't know what hit them".  There's a larger discussion that I think would be interesting to look at in regards to the racial differences between Mexican Noemí and this English family who has been living in this Mexican town for generations and how that impacts Noemí's agency but I think that would quickly veer into spoiler territory.   

I talked about the general horror aspects earlier, but I wanted to mention the way the house is used in this book.  The house, like many gothic horror novels, is a character.  We are told in the book summary that the house is invading Noemí's dreams and turning them into nightmares.  It reminded me very much of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the way that there's a bit of a blurred line in most of the book on if the house is alive or if the characters are going a bit mad.  The main house feels stuck in time, almost like the people living there are trying to hold onto the past, but Noemí notes the general decay and run-down status of the house.  It was an interesting comparison to the glamorous life Noemí was leading in Mexico City.  My favorite part of gothic horror is the atmospheric dread that settles over the story as the characters try to figure out what is going on.  In this story, the house is consistently reminding Noemí that something is not quite right here.  It seemed like every time Noemí would do something fun or a bit lighthearted, as soon as she walked back into the house, there was a portrait or stain or strange noise that would bring her back to reality.  The house played a much larger part in the story than I was expecting and, in the end, we got answers and explanations to the overall state of the house and what had been happening to Noemí while she was there.

Overall, this was a fantastic gothic horror that had a nice slow build-up of weird and creepy things happening only to really kick into gear in the last 25%.  Really great character building and agency for the protagonist throughout the book.

 301 pages.

 **CW/TW: suicide, body horror, incest, sexual assault, cannibalism, gaslighting

 

The Hunger - Alma Katsu

 

 The Hunger is a historical fiction horror story following the infamous Donner Party during their 1846 attempt to reach California.  Their whole journey is peppered with continued misfortunes such as depleted rations, interpersonal conflicts, inhospitable weather conditions, and the disappearances and deaths of some of the members.  To top it all off, there's a growing sense of evil that surrounds the party as they dwindle in numbers and strength.  Are the shadows that flit through the forest in the night simply a hungry pack of wolves, or are they something more sinister and perhaps supernatural?

I liked this book while I was reading it.  I really liked it when I finished it.  And the longer I sit and let the story percolate in my brain, the more I really really love it. This story ended up not being exactly what I thought it would be but in the best possible way.  What I was expecting was a book that really focused in on the winter and the cannibalism/survival elements that most people know about the Donner Party.  I was expecting a ton more gore or on-the-page violence and for the supernatural element to be either a figment of the characters' imaginations or super visible and integral to the story.  What I got instead, was a quietly horrifying story that centers mostly on what humanity and civilization mean and how quickly those lines in the sand can be crossed when survival is on the line.  Explorations of humanity like this are my all-time favorite theme to explore and is the main reason why I love psychological thrillers so much.  I'm immensely fascinated by how far humans can be pushed and the sheer horrific actions they can take against their fellow humans for various reasons.  If you were expecting this to be a book where the party bands together in solidarity to fight supernatural creatures in the woods, this is not that book.

 For basically the first 75% of the book it is pretty straight up historical fiction following the Donner Party as they make the move West in their wagon train.  There are some hints at supernatural elements but they are often written off as just Native American stories or figments of imagination. However, the supernatural elements really come into full swing at the last 25% where we learn from multiple perspectives the truths behind the stories and rumors.  The horror elements are consistently ramping up throughout the story as tension, stress, and bad luck plague the travelers.  I'm not usually a big reader of historical fiction because I find a lot of times that the stories feel either overly restricted by needing to match the real events or that the stories rely too heavily on the shock factor that the events really happened. I first learned about the Donner Party in 6th grade and was fascinated that they resorted to cannibalism for survival.  I think that situation is so far removed for most modern-day readers that if this was a 100% faithful retelling of the completely true events, it still would have been interesting for many readers.  However, I'm so thrilled that Katsu went further and took some creative liberties with the story.  In the note in the back of the book, Katsu states that "names, locations, and dates have remained but much else has been changed to fit the story". The best way I can describe it is that this story has a really solid foundation in facts of what happened and then Katsu gives some extra creative flair on top.  This way, even when the supernatural/horror elements are really ramped up in the last 25%, they are still completely grounded in reality which makes them more horrifying (in my opinion).  There are no aliens coming down and abducting the Donner Party, for example.  I could see some people making the argument that the only people who interact with the supernatural elements in the story are either sick, hallucinating, or are otherwise mentally unstable so maybe, just maybe, there isn't any supernatural element to this at all.

What I found really interesting was the balance between outside and inside threats woven throughout the story.  At the start of the story, there are the stereotypical tales of some of the Native American tribes sacrificing people or attacking the white settlers as they pass through.  However, we are shown through multiple interactions that the Native Americans in the area are wary of the settlers but are not outwardly hostile.  In fact, the main threats come from inside the wagon train community.  There are some members of the party who wish to talk to the tribes and learn from them, but most of the members are either actively hostile and racist toward them or at the very least heavily prejudiced.  This tension was highlighted time and time again when Native Americans were shown to be helpful to the white settlers but the settlers themselves couldn't see past their own racist ideas so as soon as something went awry, they were blaming the Native Americans even if a more rational explanation was that someone in their own party was responsible.  Katsu gives an explanation in the note at the end of the book that she was very intentional with balancing the general mindset of the times from the settlers with thoughtful and balanced representation from the Native American side.  I think evaluating this idea of 'us' vs 'them' is always really interesting, but especially so in times of extreme stress.  I attended a guest lecture in college about horror movies and the talk revolved around the idea that the horror genre acts as a mirror for the fears in society at that time and gives society a way to explore and evaluate different outcomes of that fear.  Now I'm not sure if Katsu intended this book to be looked at as any sort of political or societal commentary but it was published in 2018 and as a reader in 2021, it is hard to separate the events of the past 4 years and the current climate from the similarities I saw presented in the book.  Once the sort of 'origin story' of the supernatural elements of the book are revealed this us vs them discussion and exploration takes on a new depth and I was in awe at how well balanced and nuanced the reveals were.

My least favorite part of reading this book most likely stems from me not being a historical fiction reader and it was that I could not read this book for long periods of time.  For some background, I've been a reader since childhood and I was an English major in college so I've gotten very good at reading quickly while still understanding what I've read.  Thanks to this skill, I can regularly finish a 300 page book in an afternoon.  For a more character-driven story, I average 100 pages an hour.  For a more plot-driven story, that number drops to about 60 pages an hour.  The version of The Hunger I read on my tablet was 373 pages so this book should have taken me somewhere between 3.75 and 6.21 hours to read (so, basically, a nice weekend afternoon).  I also prefer to read my books in as few sittings as possible because I like to completely immerse myself in the story. For this story, however, I couldn't read this book for more than an hour at a time and it took me 10 days to finish (so about 10 hours of reading).  Now, this isn't because the book was overly complicated or the writing was dry - quite the opposite, actually.  Katsu packed in so much information and so many characters and character relations that my brain simply could not take in any more information after about an hour.  For that hour of reading, I was completely engrossed in the story and I hung on every word, but I would quickly reach my mental limit and had to put the book down for at least a few hours to let all the new information sink in.  Now this might not be a detriment for readers who only read in short bursts anyway but this was the first book in a long time that I had to put down because of the actual story and not because it was time to get dinner started.  I've found this sort of pattern to be true with the few other historical fiction books I've read in the past, but most of those other ones also didn't hold my interest so I would put them down after a bit and found myself never picking them back up.  The Hunger was a book that I wanted so badly to cuddle up on the couch with and get lost in and I was frustrated that I had to keep putting it down when I wanted to just keep reading.

I've said it before in other reviews, but I'm 100% a character-driven reader and Katsu is masterful at characters in this story.  We bounce between multiple characters in the party as well as back and forth in time.  Plus, there are multiple other characters who we see a lot even if we are never directly following them.  There were about 90 members in the Donner Party so Katsu had a lot of characters and interpersonal relationships to build (we obviously don't get introduced to all 90 characters, but still).  Now despite being a character-driven reader, I'm absolutely horrible with remembering names.  If a story has two characters with names that start with the same letter, I'm most likely going to get them confused (I'm horrible with names in real life as well).  Of all the different characters we interacted with, by the end of the book I could only recall 3 of them by name.  However, I could still keep track of all the different relationships and connections between characters which I find more important in the long run.  Katsu also did a great job at reminding the reader of character relationships when a character we hadn't seen in a while popped up on the page.  Just a little reminder like "her daughter" or "his employee" was enough to trigger my memory so I had the context I needed for the upcoming chapter. Katsu also develops really extensive backstories for the characters that we learn as the book progresses which helps explain some of their actions in the present situation.  These backstories also serve to show the reader that none of the people on this wagon train are perfect, a lot of them are escaping their pasts with this move to California.  Getting to know these characters in such detail when you know what they're eventually going to endure is heartbreaking and I found myself rooting for them despite knowing what was going to happen.

Finally, I want to talk about the writing style which, in my opinion, can really make or break a historical fiction book.  I found the writing style to be the perfect balance of literary flowery language and matter of fact bluntness and this contrast in the language worked perfectly with the subject matter. It was really interesting to see how the beauty and awe of the landscape descriptions contrasted with the harsh realities of life in a wagon train.  The writing was very engaging which is exactly what I, personally, need in order to enjoy a historical fiction.  Then, in the later parts of the books where the horror comes into the forefront, the writing isn't overly descriptive of the events which makes it almost more horrific.  We were back to more matter of fact descriptions which left the reader no wiggle room for misunderstanding the enormity of what was happening.  By the end, the characters were facing a brutal truth of the need to survive and the writing didn't shy away from that fact which I really liked.  As I said before, we don't see a lot of detailed gore on page but it is explicitly discussed multiple times.  I think this story does such a good job playing the majesty of the idealized wagon train experience with the harsh realities of the actual journey and the writing style is a big factor in that for me.

Overall, this was a fantastic read even if it wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I started.  Great character development, horror elements were used expertly and not overdone, good balance between factual historical fiction and more flowery story.  I had to slow down my reading to make sure I could absorb all the information that was on the page, but I always wanted to come back after I put the book down.  

373 pages.

 

 

 

 

The Burning Girls - C.J. Tudor

 

This story revolves around a church in a small town in England.  The book summary starts: "Five hundred years ago, eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself." Color me instantly intrigued.  This book follows multiple characters across two different timelines but mainly focuses on Jack Brooks, the new vicar for the town of Chapel Croft, and Flo, Jack's daughter. As with many sleepy small towns, there are darker things hidden under the idyllic landscape.  

This book packs a heck of a lot into just over 300 pages and the pacing does not let up the whole time.  I was immediately pulled into the story and I could not put it down until I was finished.  There are a lot of moving parts and people to keep track of, but the overall plot I found relatively straightforward.  There were some nice, quiet moments in the book where the characters could think a bit about their situation and the events unfolding, but it wasn't long (maybe a paragraph or two) before we were back in the thick of things.  I found this to be a pretty equal split thriller/mystery/horror which I really enjoyed and all of my favorite elements to those three categories I found in this book. I think Tudor did a fantastic job of cycling through the different aspects of the story at just the right moments for me to never feel exhausted at how fast one plot line was moving.  We skipped around a whole bunch and that kept the pacing up but didn't make it feel like the story was moving unbelievably fast.  The timing for the chapter breaks were really well chosen and the best way I can describe the reading experience is that the back of my brain was chewing over the information we just learned in chapter 6 while the front of my brain was following all the new things in chapter 7.  Then, by the time I would get back to the first plot line, it felt like I had enough time to process what happened and then could continue with the story.  

What I would imagine will be the most hit-or-miss part of this book for readers is the multiple POVs and timelines.  I, however, loved the structure and couldn't imagine this story being told any other way.  We follow a total of 5 characters, but 2 of them only come up every once and a while.  Our main POVs are Jack, Flo, and an unnamed narrator - all taking place in the present day.  The other 2 POVs are the two girls that disappeared 30 years ago and we follow the weeks leading up to their disappearance. Jack's POV is told in first person and the other four are third person, which is the one aspect I found jarring only because in my flow of reading I wouldn't immediately realize that we changed POV with the new chapter.  I'm more used to the chapter headings telling us which character we're following which they didn't have in the ARC I was reading (but that may change with the finished copies, I'm not sure). I really liked how each POV had their own plot line and mystery for the reader to follow. There wasn't a single time the POV switched where I wanted to skim through just to get back to another plot line.  Every time, I was excited to find out more about X or Y now that we're back with this other character.  The plot lines do all converge with the number of reveals at the end so I found the payoff to be satisfying. Some of the reveals were hinted at (pretty strongly in my opinion) earlier on in the book but there were more subtle ones that I didn't see coming.  Even the reveals that I saw coming were still interesting because I didn't count on how that reveal would impact the other characters we're following.

I do wish we had gotten more interaction and politics of the day to day activities of being a vicar in a small town.  There's one main family in the village who is described as being very influential and donates a lot of money to the church which does come up later in the book but I would have liked to see that family using some of that power earlier for somewhat mundane things.  I think this would have helped flesh out Jack's world a bit more and set the town's hierarchy more clearly in my head. Along the same lines, I would have liked to see more community gatherings to see the towns people interact with each other as well as with Jack and Flo to get a better sense of how different Jack and Flo are as newcomers.  We get a bit of this during a pub-quiz night but I wanted maybe an extra 50 pages scattered throughout the book with these smaller sort of scenes and then I'd be very happy.

I really loved how well the historical events and town traditions were integrated into the story.  The titular burning girls are a town tradition to honor the spirits of the martyrs.  They are small figures made out of twigs that are set alight in a ceremony held every year by the village on the anniversary of the martyr deaths.  Over time, they have evolved into a ghost story of sorts where local legend says if you see the spirits of two of the martyrs then danger will befall you. The story of the martyrs gets brought up often throughout the book and at times makes characters question if ghosts are real.  It adds and extra layer to the story overall since the characters and the reader aren't sure what exactly is real or if there's a more logical explanation to what is going on. The story doesn't go full paranormal ghost-hunter but the reader is reminded of the legend just enough to keep it in mind as maybe a possibility of something else going on. This is where a lot of the more horror-leaning elements are integrated into the story and I think it is a really great way of adding an overall spooky atmosphere to the book without having to go with big scares. 

Finally, I found all the characters were really well developed and their personalities so different that I was able to remember who everyone was.  I was a bit worried going into the book that Jack, being a vicar, would have a bit of a superiority complex or be a little too perfect just because of being involved in the church.  However, we learn Jack's backstory and how faith was something learned later in life that Jack chose to pursue.  There was a line toward the beginning about how faith is something that needs to be consistently cultivated and worked on like a marriage and, as a non-religious person myself, I thought that was a really interesting view for Jack to have and be so upfront about it with both the reader as well as some of the people in the town.  There were a lot of characters in this book but I was able to keep all of them straight in my mind because their personalities were so clearly defined and shown to the reader. The personalities weren't detailed in the way that I know everyone's favorite color, but they were detailed in such a way that I know what their place in the story was and their overall connection to the town and history. Again, I would have liked to have seen some more interactions between some of the different townspeople to see how their different personalities would interact in this small town and what tensions would arise.  We did learn a few different connections and personal histories of some of the people in the story, but as a more character-focused reader, I ideally would have had a bit more.  Give me a big town meeting or something where tensions are high and there are a bunch of snide remarks and I'm a happy reader.  

Overall, this was a great, fast paced mystery/thriller/horror that kept me engaged all the way to the end.  Multi-POV and dual timelines really helped develop a rich and complex town mystery and the story had a good payoff in the end.

305 pages.

Thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for the ARC.

Expected publication date is February 9, 2021.

The Haunting of Beatrix Greene - Rachel Hawkins, Ash Parsons, Vicky Alvear Shecter

 This book is an historical fiction set in Victorian London and follows spiritual medium Beatrix Greene.  She knows ghosts aren't real but she enjoys giving peace of mind to loved ones of the dead.  She runs into James Walker, someone who has been publicly discrediting other fake mediums, and he offers her a job for a single night in the reportedly haunted Ashbury Manor to either prove or disprove the manor's haunting rumors.  Beatrix accepts the job and during a séance, her true gift is awakened as is something else inside the manor.  Beatrix, James, and a small group of others must try to discover the truth behind the past events at Ashbury Manor while struggling to stay alive. 

First off, I loved the way this book was written.  I don't love historical fiction and I find the writing in many of them to be somewhat stuffy or pretentious.  However, since this was a horror/thriller historical fiction, I found the writing style to be a bit more modern and not so stuck-up.  The narration felt very modern while the dialogue was more old fashioned - which worked surprisingly well and even highlighted the difference between what people were thinking/feeling to themselves and what they were able to tell others (all that Victorian propriety, you know).  I thought the description of the séance scenes as well as one particularly gruesome death scene was spectacular.  I'm not one to shy away from gory stuff, but the descriptions were so gory that I was both enthralled and grossed out.  There were numerous times where the atmosphere in the manor changed based on the events taking place (a warm calming energy, a sinister cold energy, an angry firey energy) and the description and general narration really reflected the changes and the different energies that the characters were experiencing.  It was a very atmospheric read and I heavily applaud the authors for their success in this area.  I also couldn't tell that this was written by 3 different people, it was a very cohesive story.

I really liked the plot, but found it a bit predictable.  I don't read much horror (although I do watch a lot of horror TV and movies), I lean more toward the thriller side of things, so I'm not sure if these just so happen to be common tropes that come up in the horror media I do consume or if the story was overall predictable. I found myself a lot going "that's a bad person for sure" or "well obviously that's where all the bad energy is coming from" and all of my assumptions turned out to be true.  But regardless of that, it was still a very enjoyable read. I think the individual elements, while predictable, did fit together really nicely as an overall plot.  I felt like this book was a perfect blend of The Shining plus Poltergeist plus Penny Dreadful.  It was a pretty standard haunted house plot but was a fun read overall.

One of my least favorite parts (and a part that a lot of people were pointing out in their reviews on GoodReads) is the romance.  It felt very forced in the book and didn't have enough lead up.  When it first started, I thought it was the manor that was making the two characters act on their attractions.  It almost seemed like the characters were in a daze of sorts when they were first romantically interacting.  There is an event that happens later in the book as a direct result of the romance so I thought my initial feeling was correct that the characters were supernaturally affected by the house.  However, by the end, that didn't seem to be the case as at least one of the characters did seem to still be romantically attracted to the other.  If the romance wasn't caused by the house, then the whole thing seemed to develop incredibly fast (especially considering the times) and there was little chemistry built up between the characters prior to them becoming involved.  So overall, the romance was the weakest part of the plot and I choose to believe it was the house the whole time and the one character then caught a case of the feelings which lingered after the fact.

The entire cast of characters I found were well developed and interesting.  Each of them had their purpose and they all were necessary to propel the story forward.  It was a small cast of only 5 characters but since it was a very small setting (just the manor) and a short time-span (just one night), I thought it was impressive that each character was so well implemented into the plot. 

Pretty standard haunted house plot, great cast of characters, excellent writing and descriptions, romance felt a bit shoved in, but gave me some good spooky feels which is all I can really ask from a haunted house book in the first place.

198 pages

Thanks to NetGalley for providing the ARC. This book will be published on October 28, 2020.