I made faces like the faces on the stones, and I twisted myself like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat like the dead ones.
American horror novel, written by T. Kingfisher, a pseudonym for Ursula Vernon, and published by Saga Press in 2019. It was based loosely on Arthur Machen's 1904 horror story "The White People."
Our lead character is Melissa, nicknamed Mouse, and her best friend in the world is Bongo, a not-particularly-smart hound dog. Mouse's grandmother, an abusive and universally despised woman, has recently died, and someone needs to go clear out her home. Her father is recovering from an illness, so it falls to Mouse to drive down to the little house in the Appalachian foothills in North Carolina to shovel out all the garbage and get it ready to sell.
Well, Mouse and Bongo get there and find a hoarder's nightmare of a home. Every room is jammed full of junk and trash and debris. Old clothes, newspapers, ancient coupons, clothes hangers, shoeboxes. Her grandmother's room is stacked with old and profoundly creepy dolls. The only room entirely free of clutter is her stepgrandfather's room on the second floor. Frederick Cotgrave had not been much fonder of Mouse's grandmother than anyone else was, so he had his own room, and years after he'd died his former wife had never bothered to fill it up with her junk. So Mouse chooses this room as the place she'll sleep.
Mouse passes the time while she's not lugging garbage out to her truck either making friends with Foxy, Tomas, and Skip, the old hippies down the road, or reading Cotgrave's old journal, which details his obsessions with the wicked White People and the Green Book, a religious work or occult tome he was so obsessed with, he retyped it from memory, just in case his rotten wife hid the book from him again.
Mouse also takes a few hikes around the countryside and runs into a few creepy things. One is a standing stone outside the house with a grotesque, contorted face. Another is weird effigy made from a dead deer and various hacked-off branches hung up in a tree. And the other is a mountain where there's not supposed to be a mountain, topped by more standing stones.
Things get a bit beyond creepy when Mouse realizes that effigy with the upside-down deer skull is not just a bunch of bones and branches but a semi-living creature moving around the area and looking in the windows of the house. And after that, Mouse and Foxy end up traveling to the city of the White People, filled only with more effigies and one human looking to make her escape from the monsters.
Will Mouse be able to escape the threats cropping up all over the area? Will she and Bongo survive the monstrous effigies? Will she ever manage to clean up her grandmother's house?
Well, we can clear up one of those questions pretty quickly. Mouse says in the first few pages of the story that she and Bongo survive. If you're someone who doesn't like stories that kill the dog, you can put that worry out of your head.
That bit of information does cut down on some of the tension of the book, but what we're left with is still an incredibly sinister and frightening novel. A lot of this can be attributed to the setting. Yes, the house is a packed junkheap, where there's no way to know what might be lurking underneath all the trash -- and we already know Mouse's grandmother's room is full of unpleasantly creepy dolls that she's saving 'til last because she doesn't want to deal with that little nest of horror. But the setting outside the house is also unsettling -- way out in the backwoods, with no nearby neighbors, with no cell phone service. Not a fun place to be for one woman and one dumb dog, all by themselves.
Our first glimpse of the effigies -- when there's one hanging in a tree that isn't even moving -- is incredibly eerie, and when Mouse learns it can move, and that there are a lot of them, they become much more menacing. The standing stones -- especially the ones that force your face to violently contort when you try to mimic their faces -- also bring some solid chills, as do the strange passages from Cotgrave's Green Book and the mostly deserted city of the White People.
Some of the fun of this novel are the revelations you get after you've read through a few pages and suddenly realize how much danger Mouse has been in all this time. One of the big ones is when she gets spooked by the effigy hanging in the tree and only realize later that she had no idea she was looking at a dangerous monster and not just a weird clump of deer bones and sticks. There are plenty of others -- when it suddenly clicks that the woodpeckers she's been hearing aren't really woodpeckers, when she gets betrayed by a new ally, when she finally learns what's been hiding downstairs. These frequent doses of stealth horror help make this book wonderfully scary.
Kingfisher's characterization is so good here. Mouse is a great character -- curious and stubborn, but also very lost and out of her element. It means she makes mistakes that help move the story forward. Foxy is a great deal more stubborn, and she makes an excellent ally. We only learn about Cotgrave from his journals, but we can tell he was also stubborn, as well as religious, smarter than we expect, and pretty much insane from his religious experiences and what he'd learned about the White People and their servants. Plenty of minor characters -- Tomas, Skip, and the barista at the local coffee shop -- get enough characterization to make sure they're interesting. And Bongo, of course, is a very, very good dog who ain't got enough brains to fill a teaspoon.
If you're looking for a unique and beautifully frightening horror novel by one of the best genre writers in America, this is a book you'll want to track down and read for yourself.
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