Shy Grove: A Ghost Story

This creative, twisted, and relentlessly unsettling creepy house story draws deeply on the natural tensions of a stressful marriage and of parenting a teen while pulling its characters into profoundly strange territory. Gary is excited to move with his wife, Angela, and 14-year old son, Zach, into the old house he’s inherited from his reclusive Aunt Ester in a remote, dying town hours from their home in San Antonio, Tex. But the locals tell stories of an evil church that once stood on the property, and thumps from under the floorboards, disembodied voices, and disturbing erotic dreams make the house feel anything but welcoming. Zach focuses on repairing the classic truck in the barn and on his first romance, but the increasingly strange behavior of his parents becomes impossible to ignore. Johnson (Droplets) skillfully brings readers into Gary and Angela’s inner thoughts so that their flips between belief and disbelief, and the ways in which each reacts to the atypical behavior of the other while experiencing the incongruity of increasing compulsions, become terrifyingly relatable. This is an impressive new take on classic horror themes. (BookLife)