Once upon a time there was an old manse just outside of town. It belonged to an old lady who wielded a not inconsiderable amount of power. There were two kids in her charge. And then there were three. The kids who thought they were happy and content in their lives until they started asking questions and found the answers to be impossible to live with.
That can be any old witch story, can’t it? Leave to McMahon to make something genuinely original and terrifying out of it. McMahon is an author I absolutely love and read regularly. She seldom disappoints and all too frequently delights with her dark tales of her beloved Vermont. Over the years, McMahon has veered from straight up thrillers that overpower the markets right now into the spookier, more supernatural of a territory, a bold and most welcome transition. This book, to be fair, stays away from the supernatural, relying instead more on the unnatural and, oh yes, there is a difference. A pretty interesting angle from a book that’s all about monsters, isn’t it, but rest assured the monsters here are all of the horrifyingly people-like variety. This is in a way a very Nietzschean story about abyss gazing. The old lady is in fact a renowned psychology expert in charge of a small prestigious mental institution and her grandkids are a happily homeschooled boy and a girl, both very smart and both completely obsessed with monsters. A new girl is placed in their charge, someone their grandmother has been helping, a traumatized girl with scars visible and otherwise, a girl who won’t say a word. The three of them get along, though, and soon the girl is coming out of her shell, much to the delight of Vi, her adopted sister. The girls find themselves alike, two peas in the same scarred pod, and soon a very close friendship develops. So close, that Vi decides to defy her grandmother’s strict orders and invade her privacy, hoping to find out about her adopted sister’s past. What she finds will change everyone’s lives. Forever. And that’s just one of the storylines. The other one features Lizzy, the 53-year-old version of one of the girls, who became a proper monster-hunting expert, devoting her life to investigating paranormal reports but secretly all the while the person she is hunting, the person she is hoping to find the most is her long-gone sister. It’s been four decades, but Lizzy believes that her sister might be responsible for a string of disappearances – all young girls from difficult situations/families/circumstances. It’s a collision course that’ll eventually take Lizzy back to Vermont, a place she had so staunchly avoided this entire time, because sometimes to solve a mystery you have to go back to the beginning. So, that’s basically the story, a very compelling one and not just because of my personal interest in things like asylums and eugenics. The entire thing is fascinating, excellently written and extremely emotionally engaging. Tone-wise, though, it does a very strange flip toward the end - you know, that place that thrillers allot for wowing the readers with twists and turns. So the book is uniformly very dark in tone and then in the end it does this odd flip toward the light only to (at the very, very end) remember itself and turn dark once more. Peculiar. But good all the same. The entire thing is good…great even. So much fun to read. I enjoyed it tremendously. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.
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