horror – Darker Books

What Stalks the Deep

What Stalks the Deep is the third in T. Kingfisher’s “sworn soldier” series featuring Alex Easton. I highly recommend all three and they do relate to each other, but each of Alex’s adventures is complete in itself, so you don’t absolutely have to read the first two to enjoy this one. All you need to know going in is that Alex has been invited to America to help a friend, Doctor Denton, who was instrumental in defeating the mysterious evil Alex encountered in the first book. The way the invitation is worded, Alex is pretty sure Denton has encountered some new mysterious evil and Alex is not one to abandon a friend or shy away from battle. So off to America it is!

If you haven’t read any of these, “sworn soldier” is pretty much its own gender identity in Alex’s home country of Gallacia. Alex was born female but took on this new identity and pronouns (ka and kan) when ka became a career soldier. In Europe, this is generally accepted as “one of those quirky Gallacian things” and people are curious but not alarmed about it. Fellow soldiers tend to recognize one of their own breed in Alex. Americans, of course, know jack-all about this tiny European country so mostly Alex just poses as a man instead of trying to explain Gallacian language and culture. None of this is vital to any of the stories, I just find the whole thing (and Alex’s wry comments on Gallacia) interesting and amusing. I also think it’s a cool way to present the unique life experience and bond soldiers often have. Gender aside, it is its own thing, you know?

The real meat of this story is that Denton’s cousin has disappeared while exploring an abandoned mine his family owns, and there’s reason to think strange things are afoot. Finding out requires exploring the mine itself, and in the process Alex has to constantly remind themself (kanself? Kaself? I don’t speak Gallacian) that ka is a badass soldier who is absolutely not claustrophobic or scared of being deep underground. Nope. Nosiree, Alex isn’t scared one little bit and ka’ll die before ka’ll say otherwise. I love Alex.

As they explore the mine and nearby town, the friends do indeed find something mysterious and maybe evil. I don’t want to give anything away, but the “sworn soldier” series (and a lot of Kingfisher’s weird tales) generally lives in that muddy area between natural and supernatural and this book definitely lives in that area. Kingfisher takes a lot of inspiration from classic authors of weird tales, like Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen, and this particular one draws inspiration from Lovecraft and his stories of ancient gods and buried mysteries. I enjoyed, as I usually do, the updated and creative spin she put on the classic theme.

I haven’t reviewed a Kingfisher book for you yet so you couldn’t possibly know this, but I love her work. I can always count on her for engaging characters and solid storytelling, and though she leans more toward haunting and fairytales than gore, she’s great at creating a spooky atmosphere and has a real knack for creative and disturbing imagery. I haven’t read a book of hers yet that I didn’t enjoy, and I find Alex Easton’s adventures especially delightful. Plus the cover art is awesome. I listened to the first two books on audio* but someday I’ll have to go buy physical copies because the artwork is just that good.

*I don’t listen to a lot of audiobooks but I recommend these if you’re into that sort of thing. All the books are written in first person as if Alex is telling us the story, and Avi Roque does a great job conveying Alex’s sense of humor and soldierly stoicism while preserving ka’s unique identity.

Until next time . . . as always, embrace the darkness and read more books.

Ring Shout Review

This is a Trex review for Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout.

Although nonfiction about the Klan is full of horror enough, this book takes the existence of the real Klan and layers on the supernatural. What if some klansmen were literal monsters? Inhuman creatures with supernatural strength disguised as humans? Ring Shout tells the story of Maryse Boudreaux and her two deadly compatriots as they hunt and grapple with white-hooded monsters in 1915 Macon. They are watched over and aided by Nana Jean whose magic called them to her to fight evil. She brews magical water by channeling the energy of spiritual “shouts” through herself. Maryse wields an otherworldly sword that was forged by slaver chiefs who channeled their regret and anguish into its’ smoky blade. She is the champion chosen by three spirit “aunties” who Nana Jean doesn’t trust and calls “haints.” There is a new and powerful entity in Macon who has pushed into Maryse’s dreams – Butcher Clyde. His plan is to use the film “The Birth of a Nation” to create a portal for an even more powerful and destructive entity than himself to enter the world. There are a lot of supernatural and frankly freaky as hell things in this book. The author does some truly terrifying things with mouths and teeth. The pacing and action feel more fantasy but the body-horror and supernatural entities make this a decidedly creepy (in the best possible way) book.

As compelling and surprising as the supernatural elements are, just as rewarding were the historical and cultural details. Nana Jean is a Gullah woman and speaks in Gullah on the page. The history and significance of shouts is explained and revered as one of the key factors of the magic in the book. One of Maryse’s friends, Chef, was a Harlem Hellfighter in the war. Disguised as a man, she fought. Now she kills monsters with homemade bombs charged with Nana Jean’s blessed water. One setting of the book is a jook joint owned by Maryse’s love interest. It’s hard not to imagine a more formalized version of the jook from Sinners and this one also gets beset by monsters so I feel fine drawing that comparison and using the movie set in my imagination. On her journey to defeat Butcher Clyde and what hell he is trying to bring forth, Maryse seeks out The Night Doctors. They are terrifying beings based on the historical atrocities committed against enslaved peoples in the name of medicine. It’s not every day that a book teaches me so many things and does so while weaving it all together seamlessly.

Ring Shout is a skillfully written book. It’s entertaining and thought provoking at the same time. While transporting you to a different historical time and place, it also imagines a world where the oppressed have magical tools at their disposal to combat injustice. Not everyone, but some. But so does the enemy. In fact, one of the inciting incidents for everything going on in the book is the release of The Birth of a Nation. In actual history, that movie triggered a resurgence of the Klan. This is also so in the book but some of those human Klansmen also become monsters because of the racist, hateful power of the film. At the climax, Maryse must decide whether she wants to take that power for herself and avenge her people or reject Butcher Clyde’s proposal. Would the end justify the means? Would vengeance make anything better?

Ring Shout got national acclaim and it was well deserved. If you haven’t read it yet, change that. It’s short, action packed, compelling, and even though there were some spoilers in this review, the journey is more important than the destination with this one. Just because you know where it’s going doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy how it gets there.

Song of the Sandman

I finally read the sequel to A God in the Shed. That first book by J-F Dubeau brought us a gruesome yet hypnotic unnamed god and a whole slew of secret societies trying to bend that god to their own purposes. The book ended in a confrontation that killed several people and didn’t resolve much.

The second book, Song of the Sandman, picks the story up not long after that, following several different survivors and delving deeply into the lives of the Sandmen, the society/cult that now (just barely) has the god contained.

Venus Mackenzie, the girl who actually kept the god in her shed in the first book, has been wandering Montreal looking for someone who can help her find it and try to kill it. As she does that, she has to contend with her guilt and pain over her part in this mess while knowing she’s still intimately connected to the god.

Daniel, whose father succumbed to the god’s lure in the first book, has gone to find his mother and brother. He’s really not sure how he feels about them, seeing as how they’re the backbone of the Sandmen and seem to think that if they just learn to control the god they can turn it into a benevolent deity who grants all their wishes. Meanwhile, they have the god locked up in the basement. They’ve trained a girl to sing such perfect lullabies that she can lull the god to sleep for days at a time. Of course, every time it wakes up it starts killing every cult member it can get its hands on, so it seems they’re a long way from their dream of transforming the god of death and hate into something less murdery.

Oh, and the girl who sings? She’s a prisoner herself, kidnapped years ago and also kept in the basement pretty much any time she’s not singing. The Society of Sandmen seems pretty mean for people dedicated to bringing about a peaceful utopia. They don’t seem to know they’re the bad guys, but I’m pretty sure they’re the bad guys.

There are other threads to the story, equally intriguing and complicated, but I’ve given you a good taste of what you’re in store for. The book switches back and forth between characters, whose paths sometimes cross in surprising ways, as the books weaves toward a grand confrontation between several characters, the Sandmen, and the god everyone wants a piece of. As the second book in a series that will clearly continue, we reach the end with many unanswered questions, but the end is dramatic and satisfying, with a couple big twists that make us excited for the next chapter in this saga.

In fact, this book’s grand finale felt more fully set up and more fully satisfying than the first book’s finale. In spite of its sprawling transitional vibe (the second book of a trilogy is always the trickiest) it was pretty enjoyable. I especially enjoyed reading about Alice, the girl with the power to sing the god to sleep. Her story arc and her psychology are especially interesting as she wrestles with understanding she’s merely a tool for the cult leader while also exploring her power over and kinship with this god, her fellow prisoner. This series seems to be getting better with each book and I’m excited to read the next one.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books!

White Horse

Today I present you White Horse by Erika T. Wurth. I got this at Op Cit in Santa Fe. Their website is sad and basic but in real life the store is a legit hoard of used books. Literal piles of books everywhere. I think I got this book in the crime section? Or mysteries? Their official horror section is tiny, as it is in most used book stores, so I browse other sections. This mystery promised “disturbing visions,” which sounded horror adjacent. The lady at the register said it was a great book. Then she paused and said “but it gets really dark. Are you okay with dark?” Yes, I’m okay with dark.

Kari James lives in Denver but she grew up in Idaho Springs, a tiny mountain town west of Denver. A bunch of her family still lives up there, including her cousin/best friend, Debby. Debby is pretty white but is fascinated by the native ancestry of her cousin’s side of the family, so when she finds an old bracelet with native symbols on it, she brings it to Kari. It belonged to Kari’s mother, you see . . .

Turns out the bracelet is cursed. Or blessed, maybe. It’s definitely connected to Kari’s ancestors and just having it around triggers powerful visions of Kari’s mother and sometimes other ancestors. Kari is not into this at all. Her mother disappeared when Kari was just two days old and Kari has always assumed she just couldn’t handle motherhood and ran off. After her mom ran off, her dad regularly drank himself into a stupor and eventually got into a car wreck that caused serious brain damage; Kari spent most of her young life helping nurse a father who could barely dress or feed himself and as far as Kari’s concerned, it’s all 100% her mom’s fault for bailing on them.

But these visions are showing something way more complicated than what Kari’s believed and whenever she goes to the real life locations her visions show, Kari finds another complicated piece of her mother’s history. While the visions are also terrifying, showing her mother bloody and screaming, being followed by a stinking monster with vicious claws, Kari makes time to follow them up, often with Debby at her side for moral support.

A lot of this book is about Kari’s personal growth, her coming to terms with her own past mistakes, her own emotional blocks and unresolved issues, her sometimes selfish and dependent relationship with Debby. Kari is an interesting character and an unreliable narrator. Sometimes we can see her problems way before she sees them in herself, and this is sometimes frustrating and sometimes fascinating, while allowing us to connect with Kari on a deep level as she wrestles her demons.

It also turns out to be a murder mystery. Pretty early on, Kari realizes her mom probably didn’t just run off to party or whatever, but it’s not clear what actually happened to her. It turns out Kari’s mom was heavily involved with the American Indian Movement, which means the FBI might have been out to get her. But the movement also had some dangerous people on the inside, so maybe one of them did something to her. Then, on top of these suspicions, Kari realizes her own grandfather was not such a good guy. Both Kari’s visions and her brief encounters with the man make him a suspect, too.

Both the visions and the real life mystery come together in dramatic fashion at the book’s climax. Kari’s final showdown is a blend of fantasy and reality as she faces both her mom’s killer and the demon of her visions at the same time. It might be a bit over the top with its technicolor dream sequences but it was also pretty gripping.

This was a pretty serious look at the way generational trauma and larger political issues can play out on the messy individual level, especially for indigenous women. I think it does a good job and represents a point of view that is really pushing to be heard right now. I’m not sure when I’ll be posting this review but it turns out I’m writing it on Columbus Day/ Indigenous People’s Day.* Seems like an especially good day to be thinking about a book like this. Though it might not be technically horror this book is definitely dark, and it’s a good one to read if you’re looking for alternate perspectives and dark books by indigenous authors.

*Turns out it took me months to post this, as you can see. I write reviews as I read but I don’t post them in any particular order.

As always, you can follow us here or on Substack. Embrace the darkness and read more books.

Red Rabbit Review

My kid picked this book out for me. I was browsing the horror shelves, one of my favorite pastimes, and she asked “if I pick a book will you read it?” Yes, of course. Pick anything and I will totally read it. So she handed me Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. I do not regret saying yes to a random horror novel. Red Rabbit was a delightful book.

It reads very much like a fairy tale or folk tale, with lightly sketched characters guided by fate on an epic quest, but with a distinctly pioneer American flavor. We’re mostly following a posse of folk on a quest to kill a witch up in Kansas. There’s a pretty large reward for anyone who can take her out. Everyone in the posse has their own agenda, and only one old man, Tom Goggins, really cares about killing the witch. Because he is a self-taught witch hunter looking to make a name for himself. Best friends Moses Burke (Civil War army surgeon) and Ned Hemingway (well dressed cowboy) are just along for the ride, Rose Nettles has recently lost (killed?) her husband and can’t run their homestead alone, and Benito Cortez is running for his life after an ill-advised affair with a lawman’s wife. It seems fate has brought them together, along with the silent orphan they all just call Rabbit.

While this posse is traveling north into Kansas, having some weird and dangerous adventures along the way, the witch they’re hunting is tracking them along with everyone else trying to get at her. Sadie Grace is her name and she doesn’t seem particularly evil but she sure does have magic powers. She’s not worried too much about who’s coming to kill her, not even this posse seemingly thrown together by fate. She can handle whatever’s coming at her. She’s not too thrilled about the two so-called U.S. marshalls headed her way, though. One of them seems pure evil and pretty powerful. Him, well, she’ll have to be prepared for his arrival.

Despite its charming folk tale style, this book has a lot of dark and gory bits. That demonic U.S. “marshall” does some incredibly cruel and gruesome stuff, and our posse of heroes meets ghosts and cannibals and more on their journey. This book has an exciting blend of charm and horror, blending threads of American and Mexican folk magic with some old world European tropes my pioneer ancestors could have brought with them across the ocean. It was a fun read.

It also looks like Moses Burke gets his own separate novel after this quest is done. There’s a free snippet of Rose of Jericho at the end, featuring him. I’ll have to pick it up next time I go book shopping. If it’s anything like Red Rabbit it will be a great story.

As always, follow us here or on Substack; embrace the darkness and read more books.

Cinderwich: a Review

I guess Cherie Priest is known for steampunk but I haven’t read any of those books. This is the second horror novel of hers I’ve read, though, and I enjoyed both of them quite a bit. (I’ve read Cinderwich and The Toll. I read The Toll before I started this blog but maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.) Priest is great at creating quirky and engaging characters and setting them in delightfully haunted spots in the swamps and hollers of the American south. Cinderwich is very gothic and also very southern gothic, which I like.

Cinderwich is a short one, almost a novella at around 160 pages, and the story it tells is pretty straightforward. Ellen Thrush is named after her aunt Ellen, who disappeared before she was even born. It’s kind of awkward being constantly compared (both favorably and not) to an aunt she never knew, so she usually goes by her middle name, Kate.

Aunt Ellen’s disappearance was quite the mystery and no one was affected more than Ellen’s girlfriend at the time, Dr. Judith Kane. Decades after the disappearance, when Kate ended up in grad school where Judith worked, they bonded for a while over Ellen’s life and possible death. Judith would share memories and Kate got to know a different side of her namesake. Eventually Kate left grad school and the two drifted apart, but Judith never entirely quit trying to solve the mystery of Ellen’s disappearance.

Years later, Judith invites Kate to visit Cinderwich, Tennessee, where for years someone has been writing “Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?” on walls and such. The name is right, the timing sort of fits, and Judith wants to follow this one last lead before giving up the search for good. Kate isn’t hoping for much but she agrees to meet in Cinderwich and help Judith investigate.

Ghostly things happen almost immediately, and they keep happening until the story’s dramatic ending. They meet probably most of the people left in this tiny ghost of a town, including three of the girls who originally found “Ellen” in the tree. The girls have since grown up into a kickass trio of very spooky, very gothy ladies who all seem to be kind of psychic. They and their house are awesome and Kate secretly wishes she could move in with them. So do I, frankly. They seem cool and they stock a wide variety of loose leaf tea at all times, it seems. It sounds lovely.

You might notice this story is chock full of women. It’s not a story about women exploring their womanhood, it’s not part of the town’s mystery or anything, but almost every single character is a woman of some kind. It’s just a cool ghost story centered around a bunch of women and their various lives and goals and perspectives. It gives the book a particular flavor I enjoyed.

This book isn’t gory at all, in spite of the dead body in the tree, and it’s not particularly frightening. It is, however, very spooky and magical and this town is haunted by mysterious (and sometimes malevolent) forces. I love a gothic tale with a really pervasive atmosphere and this delivers. The atmosphere is great and the mystery is satisfying, while Kate and Judith feel real and I’m rooting for them to solve Ellen’s mystery and get home safe. I highly recommend this as a quick cozy read. It’s a perfect ghost story for a long winter night.

As always, embrace the darkness with us here or on Substack.

Odd Thomas: a Review

Let’s talk about Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz. In almost every used bookstore I’ve been to, the horror section is one or two sad little shelves full of mostly Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Honestly, I didn’t even know Koontz wrote horror until I realized he’s always on the shelf next to King. I picked up Odd Thomas because I wanted to check out this second guy dominating the horror shelf and thirty seconds of googling suggested this was a popular title. Turns out this is the first in what became a whole series (and it’s mostly luck I grabbed book one instead of, like, book five). I’m not sure whether Koontz always had a series in mind or decided that after Odd Thomas blew up, but this reads just fine as a standalone novel.

Odd sees dead people. He’s a fry cook at the local cafe, he’s got a girlfriend named Stormy he wants to marry someday, and he sees dead people. He also sees shadow people and occasionally gets premonitions when something evil’s about to happen. He’s been having the same nightmare for ages, people lying dead and bloody, and it looks like his nightmare is about to come true.

This book is pretty good. Odd himself (and yes, Odd is his actual first name) is pretty likeable. He just wants to help people, checking on his landlady every morning, actively trying to hone his cooking craft, devoted to his girlfriend, and willing to drop everything for a ghost in need. He’s not a very deep or complex character but we can sympathize with the trouble his “gift” causes and we find out some tantalizing details about his childhood and his dysfunctional family as the story unfolds. The plot is the main thing here, though. It ramps up nicely as Odd gets just the worst vibe from a cafe customer and becomes convinced this guy is about to do something epically evil. He gets himself into various tense and scary situations as he tries to figure out what’s about to happen, where and when. His gift is hard to explain and even harder to prove, so he tries to keep a low profile as he investigates but in the end he has to jump right into the crisis.

It was a fairly exciting story and I’m about to give you a big spoiler, so skip this paragraph if you want to preserve the surprise. (This book is over twenty years old but I hadn’t read it until now so maybe you haven’t either.) Okay, spoiler time: there are actual Satanists involved and the book ends with a mass shooting. The Satanists felt like a silly ‘80’s throwback but the mass shooting felt both tragically relevant and oddly underwhelming in today’s world. He spends the whole book building up to a tragedy that will rock the world and I’m sure when this came out in 2003 this active shooter scenario packed a punch. Now it feels more depressing than shocking, and the villains doing it purely for the glory of Satan feels almost mockingly cute. Still, how could Koontz know what the future would become? I don’t hold this against him.

So the ending doesn’t hit now the same way it would back then, but I wonder if Odd’s childhood trauma hits even harder now that trauma is such a visible topic? Koontz doesn’t seem like a deeply psychological writer, but he does a bit of exploring of some deep trauma beneath Odd’s sunny exterior. I wonder if he explores that in the rest of the series. Someday I’ll have to pick the sequels off the sad secondhand horror shelf and find out.

As always, read more and darker books. And follow us here or on Substack.

The Angel of Indian Lake

The Angel of Indian Lake is the last book in an amazing trilogy. The trilogy begins with My Heart is a Chainsaw (read the review here) and continues with Don’t Fear the Reaper (read the review here) before wrapping up with this one.

What more can happen to Jade Daniels? What more can really be done in a town as small as Proofrock, Idaho? Apparently quite a bit as it turns out. Jade has fully stepped into the shoes of her beloved Mr.Holmes as the high school’s new history teacher. This is in spite of a severely checkered past and a record but that’s nothing Letha Mondragon’s money and influence couldn’t overcome. Letha and Jade go way back at this point and Jade is “Aunt Jade” to Letha’s daughter. On paper, things have really improved for Jade. Off paper, Jade is barely keeping herself together when things start to happen again.

Like in the earlier two books, it isn’t a singular murderer or supernatural force attacking Proofrock. This time though, it took me much longer to parse what all was going on and who was doing what. I mean that in the best possible way. The national forest gets set on fire AGAIN. There is a multi-bear rampage. I audibly gasped when that happened. There are zombies. We finally get to the bottom of why Rexall is the way he is (and get some satisfaction in that regard). There is so much more. Things move at a breakneck pace but the action is still punctuated by Jade’s thoughts and visits “to the video store.”

I am a big fan of a trilogy. Three is my goldilocks number of books in a series I think. Like any really solid trilogy, you need all three of these. Each book brings something new, something essential, and Jade is a new flavor of herself as time and the story wear on. I think the idea of picking a favorite book out of three that belong together is pointless but I will say that this third version of Jade is my favorite. I believe her. Something I have appreciated about Graham Jones’s writing throughout is the authenticity of his characters. How they react and change after all the violence and trauma makes sense for human beings. Jade is the best example of this. She’s pretty poorly adjusted but masking like a champion and trying her damnedest to just live some kind of life. Even when things kick off again, her continued vulnerability is what makes her worth reading about. She is not a Sarah Connor or Ripley. Who would be? She is damaged inside and out with fewer toes than she started all this with. She’s broken in ways that make sense while still trying to move forward and I find that really endearing.

This book is going to break your heart in more than one place. And yes, I know the second one did too. The first one also. But this one really did me in a couple of times. Trust me though, It’s worth it.

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Near the Bone

I was excited to read Near the Bone because years ago I read one of Christina Henry’s other books, one of her series inspired by Alice in Wonderland. I remembered liking it; the Disney version of Alice really freaked me out as a kid with its black backgrounds and creepy dream logic, so I was intrigued by Henry’s dark take on the tale. Near the Bone, however, didn’t impress me the same way.

As a voracious and dedicated reader of novels, I can’t believe I’m about to say this but Near the Bone should have just been a movie. As a book this kind of fell flat.

Mattie lives on the mountain with her husband, William. Her much older, extremely religious, horrendously abusive husband. They are utterly alone yet he still watches her like a hawk, dictating her every move and timing her to the minute. She has odd flashbacks and thoughts–snippets of songs she shouldn’t know, tiny memories of a sister and a mother–that William insists are dreams and nonsense.

And now, all of a sudden, there’s something new in the woods. Something hunting the animals and leaving their mutilated corpses in the trees. First the mysterious beast violates their carefully isolated territory, then a trio of cryptid hunters violate their territory as they look for the mysterious beast. William is not happy about any of this, and when he’s not happy Mattie is generally the one to suffer.

Great set-up, right? This would be a great movie. Mattie fighting between fear and hope as she finally connects with other humans and maybe, just maybe, a chance to escape her husband’s oppression. Everyone, hero and villain alike, stalked by the mysterious beast. It would be tight and terrifying in the right hands.

A book, on the other hand, usually lets you live with the characters over time and really get to know them. We can see deeper into their souls and follow their inner journeys as the plot unfolds. This is where movies based on novels usually fall short. With these people, though, their inner journeys just aren’t that interesting. We never see into the minds of William or the three cryptid hunters at all, really. We never know why they do what they’re doing in any real way. We follow Mattie’s inner journey quite closely as she begins to remember her life before William and gains courage in the process but honestly, it’s not that interesting a journey.

Spoiler alert: it’s super clear from the beginning that William must have kidnapped Mattie at a young age and brainwashed her into being his child-bride. We never know why except that he’s a fundamentalist nutcase and we never know how he managed to cozy up to Mattie’s mother without setting off all the alarm bells in the world. Mattie’s inner journey gives us zero insight and she just reads as kind of a mishmosh of stereotypes and tv tropes. Trying to follow Mattie’s inner journey actually detracted from the rest of the action, which was actually pretty exciting when we got to focus on it.

So yeah, it should have been a movie. Just show us Mattie and three cryptid hunters running around a mountain, trying to evade a mystery monster and a psycho kidnapper with a shotgun. Maybe a few brief flashbacks of Mattie’s previous life and how she’s suffered at William’s hands, so we can feel vindicated when he suffers and loses control of her. I can fill in her inner life for myself, and probably in a more interesting way than this novel did.

The Death of Jane Lawrence

I’m not sure where I picked up The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling. It might have been Barnes & Noble or maybe Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colorado. Either way, it’s mine now. I loved this book while I was reading it. Could hardly put it down. Once I was done, though, the doubts crept in. Now that I’m sitting down to write I’m not quite sure what to say.

Victorian England was full of people trying to do magic and contact the dead. Seances and ceremonial magic were all the rage. It was also the heyday of gothic novels full of haunted country houses and dark family secrets. The Death of Jane Lawrence combines these elements to great effect. This book is set in a fictionalized version of Victorian England where the country houses are actually haunted and magic might be real.

Jane, herself, is a bundle of trauma. The book isn’t clear about its alternate history but it seems war came to Britain when she was little, killing her parents and partially destroying her hometown. Jane has lived with the Cunninghams in another city since then. Mr. Cunningham has been offered an important post in Jane’s old hometown, now rebuilt and thriving, and Jane can’t stomach the thought of moving back there. She’s mathematically gifted and has a good head for business, but not even in magical fictional England can she just get a job and live on her own. Her best option, it seems, is a marriage of convenience to a suitable local man.

She sets her sights on local doctor Augustine Lawrence, who could certainly use a business manager even if he’s unsure about marrying. Still, the two get along well and Augustine is quickly convinced to sign on to Jane’s marriage scheme. He has one odd condition, though. Once they’re married, he’ll spend every night at his family’s manor house and she’s never allowed to stay over. She’ll live at the office in town. Since Jane mostly sees this as a business arrangement she’s fine with this. It’s weird, sure, but it helps keep the boundaries firm around their arrangement.

That plan, of course, immediately falls apart. On the day of their marriage, they have dinner in Augustine’s mansion and then he promptly, anxiously, ushers her into a carriage as night falls. A heavy storm has started and, sure enough, less than a mile down the road the carriage is damaged in a mudslide and Jane has to trudge back to the mansion for the night. Their arrangement didn’t even last one day.

Believe it or not, all this background takes up very little room in the novel. It’s painted quickly, in light brush strokes, and the real meat of the story is what happens in the manor house and all the magic Jane learns in the attempt to undo what happens in the manor house. The plot rushes along at breakneck speed, with most of the events occurring in a matter of days. Immediately after her wedding, Jane figures out that Augustine’s family home is deeply haunted (and so is he) and she undertakes some expert level ceremonial magic in order to set things right and save their brand new marriage. She’s especially keen to do this because, in spite of all their careful businesslike planning, Jane and Augustine are falling in love.

Most of the book is a disorienting round of magic rituals and haunting visions, where you’re never quite sure what’s real and what’s imaginary, what’s magical and what’s mundane. I found it compelling as I was reading it, racing to the end of the novel as Jane pushed through each stage of her grand magical working. By the end I was both deeply confused and deeply invested in Jane’s goals. Things got surreal, a bit gruesome, and deeply moving in moments. The writing itself becomes more choppy and quick, jumping from scene to scene in a disorienting manner.

And then the roller coaster ended, I had time to breathe and think, and I became less satisfied. Was this an elegantly written clash of realities or a cheap string of parlor tricks? What does the ending mean? Do Jane and Augustine live happily ever after as presented, or do those little ambiguities hint at something much darker? There are a few dark possibilities and no real way to choose between them. I’m still not sure whether that’s brilliant and tantalizing or cheap and annoying.

I actually looked for opinions on the ending and was not surprised to find wildly differing takes. Some people believe Jane has learned the secrets of magic, though she’s trying to keep that secret. Some think she’s mentally broken, trapped in her own fantasy. Some think she’s dead. Considering the book’s title, that last is a strong possibility, but there are strong arguments in favor of other interpretations. I still can’t decide if this is an intriguing mystery or a frustrating non-ending.

I’m a sucker for all the Victorian occult stuff, though, and this book really swept me up in it. I enjoyed the hell out of it as I was reading, even if it didn’t stick with me in the most satisfying way. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your opinion on this book. Loved it? Hated it? What do you think the ending means?