B&N: A ghost story lives or dies on its creep factor, and Priest absolutely nails it, spinning a Southern Gothic tale of family secrets and avenging spirits with just enough humor sprinkled throughout to break the tension before racheting the suspense back up to heart-pounding levels.
Tor.com: Priest has a striking prose style–she’s immensely readable–and a chilling ability to write really unnerving scenes. […] The pace is tight the whole way through, with tension that rises peak on peak up to the climactic crisis. […] The house itself is an incredible character. Place matters, here: matters deeply. One of the most notable things about The Family Plot, as a southern Gothic haunted house horror novel, is the sense of ever-increasing claustrophobia. It’s about interiors, both literal and metaphorical: the interior of the house, and the inside of a person’s mind and/or emotions. The inside of the home turned strange and threatening: the inside of the self exposed and forced into the light.
World Fantasy Award nominee Yoon Ha Lee’s story collection, to include the current short fiction from the Hexarachate setting of NINEFOX GAMBIT along with new previously unpublished stories, to be published in 2018, sold to Jonathan Oliver at Solaris via Jennifer Jackson.
Chuck Dutton built Music City Salvage with patience and expertise, stripping historic properties and reselling their bones. Inventory is running low, so he’s thrilled when Augusta Withrow appears in his office offering salvage rights to her entire property. This could be a gold mine, so he assigns his daughter Dahlia to personally oversee the project.
The crew finds a handful of surprises right away. Firstly, the place is in unexpectedly good shape. And then there’s the cemetery, about thirty fallen and overgrown graves dating to the early 1900s, Augusta insists that the cemetery is just a fake, a Halloween prank, so the city gives the go-ahead, the bulldozer revs up, and it turns up human remains. Augusta says she doesn’t know whose body it is or how many others might be present and refuses to answer any more questions. Then she stops answering the phone.
But Dahlia’s concerns about the corpse and Augusta’s disappearance are overshadowed when she begins to realize that she and her crew are not alone, and they’re not welcome at the Withrow estate. They have no idea how much danger they’re in, but they’re starting to get an idea. On the crew’s third night in the house, a storm shuts down the only road to the property. The power goes out. Cell signals are iffy. There’s nowhere to go and no one Dahlia can call for help, even if anyone would believe that she and her crew are being stalked by a murderous phantom. Something at the Withrow mansion is angry and lost, and this is its last chance to raise hell before the house is gone forever. And it seems to be seeking permanent company.
RT Book Reviews: Priest continues to cement her reputation as a master of modern gothic with a haunted house tale that’s a slow burn with an utterly addictive finale. Though it feels like more could be done with the ghosts of the Withrow house, the living characters do more than their fair share of lifting with interactions that are charming and funny. That said, fans and new readers should walk away satisfied and just a little bit worried when in the house alone.
NPR: But it was that rare ability of Kowal’s to make what could have been a completely goofy add-on to the British war effort into something that felt completely wedded and solid that sold me that spark of a great idea, well-executed. It is a story that just works. That lays out a presumption (ghosts are real), builds a plot architecture around it (they might be useful intelligence assets), and then grounds it with emotional weight (those forced to talk to the ghosts of the young and dead might not come out of it unscathed).
Booklist: In Priest’s gothic haunted-house story, workers at failing architectural salvage company are given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse their fortunes, if they can survive the ghosts plaguing the property. Dahlia Dutton, the daughter of Music City Salvage’s owner, loves old houses. She’s still sore over losing her own beautifully restored home in her divorce. Once Dahlia arrives at the grand, well-preserved Withrow estate in the Tennessee mountains, she wishes she could save it; instead, she and her crew — her estranged cousin Bobby; his lovable son, Gabe; and salvage rookie Brad — have mere days to rescue the valuables before demolition. To save money, they sleep on-site, when the mansion’s romantic charm turns menacing. Strange occurrences and spectral sightings increase as the crew dismantles the house, exposing the With row family’s secrets. Priest spices up a standard haunting with an irresistible premise focused on the “hidden treasure” aspect of salvage work. Careful character building accentuates the novel’s slow build, so by the time the salvagers are in real danger, they feel like real people, too. Despite lulls in pacing, the final scenes are terrifying. Highly recommended for fans of contemporary ghost stories.
Kirkus: A novel of unsung voices and alternate World War I history, Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal is a wonderful, fraught, and heart-wrenching read. Set against the backdrop of World War I, it reinvents history to allow unheard stories to be told, whilst at the same creating a marvellous piece of romantic speculative fiction.
And then we have the unsung voices: the voices of those who we often don’t talk about when we remember WWI. The voices of women, people of colour, the disabled: the heroes in this novel. Ginger is a heroic, resourceful, determined, and complex character aware of her privileges (intersection feminism is a thing here), just like most of the characters – Helen, the person with the real power here is wonderfulin the novel are. The people in power dismiss them off-hand because of who they are, and the social injustices of the day are hard to read – reality often is and we oughtn’t to just brush them off. The point here is that the reader is satisfyingly rewarded by the examination of those, by the strong implication of their wrongness and by having the unsung heroes becoming the ones to save the day.
Nathaniel Zook returns to his Amish community of Paradise Springs after inheriting his grandparents’ alpaca farm—but knows nothing of the furry creatures. Only one person can teach him what he needs to know to save his family’s homestead. But his childhood best friend, Esther Stoltzfus, still the pretty tomboy he remembers, is unusually reluctant. Nathaniel suggests the schoolteacher bring along some students so they can all learn together. Suddenly, the sweet alpacas and a dear young orphaned boy are bringing Nathaniel and Esther closer than ever. Yet he’ll have to risk sharing all that’s in his heart to form the family he always dreamed of.
Hugo Award-winning editor and writer for Pitchfork, NPR, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker Jason Heller’s STRANGE STARS, about the massive influence that science fiction has had on popular music, particularly during the 1970s boom of both, to Ryan Harrington at Melville House, by Jennifer Jackson.