September 30, 2019
A retreat in the Scottish Highlands turns into a nightmare in this hair-raising, but frustratingly anticlimactic horror-fantasy novel from Lee (The Lucifer Glass). Mike, Helen, Alex, and Kay are on their way to a lakeside cottage for a post-grad vacation when they run over a stag and kill it. Fleeing the scene, they arrive at the cottage only to find it occupied by Alex’s strange younger sister, Meggie. As they settle in, Mike begins to have hallucinations of childlike laughter, disturbing repressed memories, and the dead body of the stag they killed bleeding out on the cabin floor. Things grow stranger as Mike’s night terrors cause him to sleepwalk. He becomes violent in his sleep and sexually assaults Kay while sleeping. The subsequent falling-out leaves Mike alone in the cottage with Meggie, and Mike makes a discovery that horrendously upends his life. Though the story is built from familiar horror tropes, Lee manages to sustain the suspense until the novel reaches its crisis point—but a tepid reveal dissipates the tension. The disappointing ending will leave horror-fantasy readers unsatisfied.
October 15, 2019
The latest from Lee, author of the Bram Stoker finalist The Lamplighters (2012), is set in the bucolic Scottish Highlands. Mike Carter and his friend Alex have recently finished college, and along with their girlfriends Helen and Kay, they decide to take a holiday to a peaceful cottage in the country. Their celebration is interrupted almost immediately when they hit and kill a stag on the road to the cottage. Mike, determined to set aside his worries over his job prospects and his personal anxieties, settles in for a night of revelry with his friends. As the days pass, Mike begins to have horrific nightmares often indistinguishable from reality, and as his dreams intensify, he alienates his friends and relationships. Lee creates an atmosphere of unease and foreboding that culminates in explosive violence and terror. The plot meanders at times with Mike's musings on his life choices, but the story explodes at its conclusion, revealing sinister and supernatural influences. Rife with frightening imagery, ghosts, and visceral horror, this tale will please the most ardent of horror fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)