Rookfield

White (As Summer’s Mask Slips) demonstrates his skilled hand with eerie, atmospheric scene-setting in this wonderfully weird horror novella set during a global pandemic. When wealthy businessman Cabot Howard’s ex-wife, Leana, takes their son, Porter, from the city to her cousin’s house in the Podunk town of Rookfield to evade the virus, Cabot chases after them. White’s character work on Cabot is remarkable, crafting a subtle, nuanced, and entirely believable asshole who quietly judges those around him, needs to be in the right even in conversations with children (“ ‘Well, actually,’ Cabot said”), and refuses to wear a mask. This last point becomes an issue in Rookfield, where the inhabitants take the pandemic extremely seriously: every adult wears a cloth face covering, while the children don bird-like plague doctor masks. Cabot’s conviction that something is off with the town redoubles when Leana’s cousin refuses to let him see Leana or take Porter home and their confrontation ends in gunshots. Cabot’s determined to get to the bottom of the strangeness in Rookfield—but even as it becomes clear that something otherworldly lurks in the town’s woods, White subverts expectations by showing that the real horror is that which has been inside of Cabot all along. This is a masterful work. (Oct.)