October is a busy month for most of us in my book club, Read Between the Wines, and this month it was my choice for book selection. I chose this short and quick Southern Gothic paranormal mystery for something easy to tackle but also season-appropriate. While Kingfisher has published quite a bit, this is the first of her books I’ve had the pleasure of reading.

Synopsis

The book follows Sam Montgomery, a young woman who returns home on an extended break from work to stay with her mother in the house that used to be occupied by her mysterious and prickly grandmother. Sam finds that her mother is acting quite strangely and odd things start happening around the house. With nothing but time on her hands and a growing sense of paranoia, Sam decides to investigate to get to the bottom of the strange happenings plaguing her home.

Review

I know what you might be thinking. That synopsis sounds like a million other books I’ve read in the genre. You’d be right. The “girl returns to creepy old house and experiences creepy stuff” thing has been done a lot, but this book does add its own unique vibe to it. First of all, Sam is quite relatable for your everyday human. She’s overweight, a bit boring, and isn’t exactly winning any popularity contests. She spends most of her time at her mother’s house lounging on the couch with snacks watching detective shows when she isn’t begrudgingly working on dead bug classification. You see, Sam is an archaeoentomologist. She doesn’t just study bugs. She studies long-dead bugs. Yep, that’s a job that people do willingly. Sam may be pretty passionate about what she does for a living, but not a lot of people want to listen to a grown woman drone on about her fascination with dead bugs. While this book does drift super dark toward the end, Sam lends a certain amount of quick-witted humor to keep things from getting overwhelmingly distressing. Most of the book we spend swimming around in her internal monologue, which could be painfully dull with the wrong narrator. Frankly, I enjoyed spending time with Sam’s thoughts. Her perspective is unique and refreshing. While secondary characters are a bit sparse, those that do make an appearance are memorable and well-drawn. They add something important to the ambience.

The last quarter of the novel brings about a very abrupt tonal shift. One moment we’re loping along with Sam’s thoughts, analyzing weird ladybug activity, and the next we are surging forward into darkness, chaos and a nightmare full of creepy-crawly awfulness. It is jarring, to say the least. As far as plot is concerned, there’s not really much of a mystery. The reader is given plenty of hints along the way, and we have formulated an accurate portrait well before Sam has stumbled onto the truth. I seriously doubt I’m the only one who felt this way. Nothing was surprising in the least. The only thing surprising is that ladybugs were used as a device in a horror novel.

Scary, right? Kingfisher obviously doesn’t play by the rules, and I respect that. I thoroughly expect her next book to include a horde of horrifying hamsters, if only for the alliterative quality.

In short, I found this book to be quick but enjoyable. I’m looking forward to reading more of Kingfisher’s work in the future.

Published March 28, 2023 by Tor Nightfire. ISBN 9781250829795. Hardcover. 247 pages.