Listen to Your Sister

Viel’s frenzied and addictive supernatural thriller debut follows Calla Williams, a Black 25-year-old who must play surrogate parent to her reckless younger brothers, Dre and Jaimie, after their father dies and their mother abandons them. Calla makes for an anxious parental figure, driven by fear of what she calls her Nightmare: a vivid, paralyzing dream in which she is powerless to prevent her brothers’ gruesome deaths. After a night of separate incidents in which both Dre and Jaimie are saved from certain slaughter by mysterious female figures who savage their assailants, the trio—fearing persecution from the law—hightail it from their home in Seattle to a creepy remote Airbnb. There, Calla’s Nightmare erupts into reality, subjecting all three to a harrowing and bloody confrontation with their subconscious demons given visceral life. Viel depicts her characters’ terrifying ordeals as phantasmic expressions of the racial and social forces that have shaped their lives, and her portrayal of Calla as a sacrificing martyr whose love for her family is curdling into resentment gives her story powerful emotional ballast. Though the plotting is chaotic in spots, it nimbly focuses Black American experience through the lens of horror fiction. Viel should win many fans with this. (Feb.)