Hi what the fuck just happened to me?

If Chloe Michelle Howarth wanted to become my new favorite author, she should’ve just said so instead of ruining my entire day, week, month, year like this. Because I swear to god, every sentence in this book dealt me a swift punch of emotional damage that I’m not sure how to recover from. She has such an intense way of describing characters’ emotions— I loved getting introduced to it in Sunburn, but in this novel it feels even more refined and sharpened to maximum possible effect.

Strictly speaking in terms of plot, this is a pretty slow-paced novel. Nothing crazy happens at all for most of the book. However, each character is filled with such a roiling mess of thoughts and emotions that I was gripped from beginning to end. The writing was so evocative, I could picture every setting and conversation and I found myself wishing I wasn’t reading a library copy so that I could highlight and annotate the beautiful prose. I also thought the short chapters and switching between POVs was a great way to keep things moving.

With Sunburn having been more of a contemporary litfic, I wasn’t sure how Howarth would fare with a gothic suspense novel, but she absolutely knocked it out of the park. Pretty early on, we’re introduced to a mysterious element of the main family’s past, and the way the truth gradually unspooled over the course of the book was absolutely delicious to read. This is a book about secrets and repression, about the poison that spreads when people force unpleasant realities to stay hidden. The gradual building of all these tensions to the gut-wrenching finale was so expertly done, I feel like I don’t even have the words to do it justice.

There’s so much more I could dive into with this book, because it’s such a rich treasure trove of themes, but I don’t want to give too much away — I think this is the kind of story best experienced when you go in blind. But if you’re interested in topics of repression, grief, obsession, sapphic longing, family resentments, and gothic intrigue, I’d highly recommend it. I’ll be thinking about the tragedy of the O’Learys for a long, long time.