Violet Esmie can see ghosts, and that's not even the most screwed up thing about her. Divorced, estranged from her surly teenage daughter, she's living a solitary life working as a cleaner - someone who goes into the homes of the recently deceased and cleans them out at the family's or estate's behest. It's on her latest job that she gets a call from the landscapers taking care of the grounds of her family home in Fell, New York. Sorry lady, we're quitting. We'll refund the rest of this month's payment but we're not going back. Why? Because they saw the ghost of a little boy. A little boy who uttered two words "Come home."
The ghost is her baby brother Ben who vanished when he was 6-years-old during a game of hide-and-seek. And when I say vanished - I mean poof! Not a single trace of him anywhere. Violet knows it's time, she needs to go home and settle the matter of Ben's disappearance once and for all. But she's not going alone. She calls her siblings, Vail, a UFO chaser (seriously) and Dodie, a model whose hair is a top commodity for shampoo commercials.
The siblings return to the family home in Fell to find that much hasn't changed. Even though they pretty much abandoned the place as-is, it's shockingly not overly decrepit. However the creepy shenanigans that they experienced as children are still there. Vail sees a bright light and someone/something standing over his bed (aliens?). Dodie dreams of filthy water sweeping over her bed and drowning her. And Violet, as has already been established, sees ghosts, and there's one ghost in particular who is a nasty piece of work.
Fell, New York was the setting of St. James' most excellent The Sun Down Motel, and there's always some hesitancy with me when an author returns to a beloved book. I shouldn't have been worried. What this book firmly cements is that Fell is one of St. James' more inspired creations. The setting is pitch-perfect Gothic creepiness. A small town where inexplicably horrible things keep happening with little to no explanation. Ben's disappearance is just one in a long chain of events. St. James has fun returning to Fell and slips in a few Easter eggs for fans, but nothing that will confuse new readers who are starting with this entry (there's even a call back to The Broken Girls).
The story is told in alternating points-of-view between all three siblings. The worry with this style is that some voices are frankly just more interesting than others - and that's what happened to me here. I liked Violet. Violet was interesting. Sure they're all emotionally screwed in the head, but Vail isn't great with women (love 'em, then as he's leaving 'em saying hurtful things so they don't come back around again) and also UFOs. Seriously? And yes, I realize I was reading a book about ghosts but apparently UFOs is a bridge too far for me. And Dodie? Dodie is emotionally exhausting and bitchy, although she has some nice moments at the end. I read through their sections just wanting to get back to Violet.
The story is slow burn Gothic, with the tension and darkness seeping in small increments until you're drowning in it at the end. It's good stuff, until the ending. I felt like St. James painted herself into a corner on this one. She couldn't tie it all up in a nice, neat package because there was too much our characters couldn't discover and ultimately know. And this wasn't great for me. Look, I live in a world that is messy. Where not everything gets resolved and sometimes it's "resolved" in a way where the good people get screwed and the morally bankrupt people win. The older I get, the more I live in this current hellscape timeline, I want closure. And I want the closure that genre fiction promises to readers 99.9% of the time - which is the good guys win and the bad guys get shot into the sun. The bad guys do not win in this story but there's dangling threads - namely the Ben thing is just plain weird and while we find out why the Esmie family home is haunted, there's no big red bow tying up that box. Do we get closure? Yes. Do we get all the answers? Ehh...
Still, it's an engrossing read - and seriously, Fell, New York is just fantastic. I don't know how many more times St. James can dip into this well before she starts repeating herself, but man I love that creepy little town.
Final Grade = B
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