Nowhere is the creepy, shocking, read-it-in-one-sitting-because-you-can’t-put-it-down, horror novel you’ve been waiting on. If you like horror, especially horror set in Appalachia, you need to get your hands on this book yesterday.

The premise of the story is Rachel Kennan, a hardened, rough edged cop from Richmond moves her family to the middle of nowhere Dalmouth Virginia to become the town’s new chief of police. Her family are a little less than ordinary and are immediately seen as interlopers in the small, tight knit community. When the book opens our protagonist has her career, family life, and sanity all hanging by a single slender thread, not to mention her struggles with embracing her hidden sexuality.
Things get even worse when a grotesquely mutilated body is discovered in the woods and something strange begins happening to the children of Dalmouth, including Rachel’s own girls…

I won’t veer into spoiler territory here because I think this book is good enough that everyone needs to experience it for themselves. I will however discuss my impressions of the book in general terms.
Right from the beginning this book had an easy to read, cinematic quality that reminded me favorably of S.A. Cosby’s phenomenal book Razorbalde Tears. From the start I could see the story unfolding in my mind with granular clarity and detail and could follow along easily with the well-paced action and exposition. The characters are also extremely vivid. Rachel especially is just the kind of complex, imperfect, messy person I absolutely love to read about. Her interactions with her husband Finn, a onetime writer now a hollow shell of himself, felt compelling and understandable without necessarily being positive or healthy. She’s the kind of character you can’t help but be charmed by even as she makes mistake after mistake. The characters adapt and change too, they don’t remain static in throughout the horrific events of the story, a shortcoming that’s all too prevalent in horror fiction. I don’t buy it when characters go through some of the most terrifying stuff imaginable and then stay completely unchanged as a person.

And the horror, oh my god the horror. This book is actually scary on so many levels! There are shocks, grotesque body horror, and some more lingering terror on a deeper, cosmic level as well. I love when a story manages to play on different levels of fear and this book certainly delivers on that. While death and supernatural creatures are certainly alarming, sometimes the most frightening thing of all is the darkness lurking dormant in ordinary people, the everyday sort of monstrousness in our friends and neighbors.

There is something gratifying about seeing the beginning of something and that’s just the sense I got when reading this debut novel. I felt like I was present to see the start of unique and compelling voice in fiction. The style of this book reads as if Paul Tremblay and S.A. Cosby collaborated while also having a unique tone quite distinct from either of those authors.

Not only will I read anything else this author writes, I’ll await any future titles with the eager anticipation.