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352 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2020
Annnd here's my Spring and Summer Book Recommendations! (click the link to check them out!).
25 years ago, Paul Adams experienced the worst day of his life.
Was it strange to think of the dead as friends?
The sky above was dark blue and speckled with a faint prickling of stars. No answers to be found.Meanwhile, Detective Amanda from Featherbank stumbled upon a grisly/ritualistic murder - committed by two teens against a classmate. She ends up tracing it back to Charlie Crabtree - and Paul.
What are you dreaming?Just when I think the author couldn't top the Whisper Man, this absolutely GORGEOUS gem shows up.
It’s what all good parents tell their children. And yet what does it really amount to? A hostage to fortune. It’s a promise you have to make, and one you must do your best to believe in, because what else is there?When Paul Adams got the call, he came. One hundred miles, back to Gritten. It had been twenty five years since he’d left, but mom was nearing the end, cancer, dementia, and now a fall. She is in hospice care.
It’s going to be ok.
Yes, I think about that a lot.
How every good parent says it, and how often they’re wrong.
Most of Gritten was saturated with poverty, and the view through the bus window was so drab that it was sometimes difficult to tell the empty premises from the occupied. I wanted nothing more than to escape from here—but it was hard to imagine it ever happening. The place had a gravity that held whatever was dropped where it fell. That included people.Present day Detective Amanda Beck would probably agree with Paul’s assessment from twenty five years back.
…there was something especially beaten down about Gritten. Despite the sunlight, the air seemed drab and gray, like an old wet cloth half wrung out. As she looked out at the dilapidated neighborhoods she drove through, it was difficult to shake the sensation that the place was cursed in some way—that there was something poisonous in the ground here, rooted in the history of the place, that kept the land barren and the people dead inside.People have been getting dead outside too. A revisit to the charming site of North’s first (first as Alex North, anyway, 2019’s insanely scary The Whisper Man) scare-fest, Featherbank, features two teenage charmers who slash a friend to bits leaving red handprints all over the scene. A little research shows that the case bears a remarkable resemblance to another killing twenty-five years ago, in Gritten, about a hundred miles away.
Lucid dreams are when you wake up in a dream while remaining asleep. I was obsessed with them as a teenager and have remained so to an extent as an adult. The appeal was always the idea of escape: of being in control of the world and able to do anything you want…I thought they were fertile ground to explore — that isolated teenage boys in a drab community might seize on them as means of escape. And that things could become sinister very quickly, especially if one of them began manipulating the others. - from the Bookub interviewIt led to a bloody killing, after which Charlie Crabtree was seen no more. Did he succeed in his dream? And why did he vanish while Billy Roberts was found covered in blood and holding a knife? And now there is a copycat.
Like I suspect a lot of writers, I was fascinated by a crime that occurred in Wisconsin in 2014 where two young girls attempted to murder one of their friends. The girls had become obsessed with a figure known as Slender Man and had created this fantasy world between them, to the point they believed a sacrifice would allow them to escape the real world and join him. Slender Man is of course an entirely fictional figure, but a whole subculture has grown up around him. My first thought was “how could anybody really believe this?” — but then I remembered how alienated and lonely you can feel when you’re young, the imaginative games you play and the way those can take hold, and I also started reading more about shared delusional disorder, in which two or more individuals begin to believe the same extraordinary things. - from the BookBub interviewPresent day Paul stays, during his visit, at the house in which he grew up, the place his mother was referring to when shrieking about something being in the house. In addition to having to clean up after mom, the house holds a residual creepiness from his childhood. And then there are the boxes Paul finds in the attic, the contents of which give him cause for great concern and massive confusion. The other decoration he finds in the attic has an even darker effect.
If you’re going to write about a character confronting something that happened in childhood, and about how it’s impacted them in the present, it’s inevitable you’re going to end up looking at all the factors that shaped them. And so in subsequent drafts, Paul’s mother just made more of her presence felt, until — in some ways — their relationship became the heart of the book. - from the BookBub interviewI had one considerable gripe. There is a major twist that occurs about three quarters into the book (you will know it when you see it) that was not adequately supported by preparatory hints and clues. The result was that it felt like a cheat, particularly as a later switcheroo would be impossible without this one. I know you do not expect the smoothness of say, It’s a Small World, when you use your ticket for Space Mountain, but it did feel for a bit there that the car had left the tracks.
The volume dropped a notch, the quiet rush of the real world fading away behind us. The silence in the woods was eerie, and not for the first time I found myself glancing around as I trailed behind, my heart thrumming with the strange sensation you have when it feels like you’re being watched.
Red hands, red hands, red hands everywhere—