Review by Booklist Review
Minerva Contreras is a graduate student at Stoneridge College in 1998, researching obscure horror author Beatrice Tremblay, herself an alumna of the school whose roommate, Virginia Somerset, disappeared when they were students in the 1930s. When Minerva gains access to an unpublished manuscript of Beatrice's, she realizes it's an account of Virginia's last days at Stoneridge. The tale details Virginia's belief that she was being stalked by a malignant presence, a chain of events Minerva recognizes from her great-grandmother Alba's stories of battling a witch in rural Mexico. Before long, Minerva feels the darkness coming for her as well and must draw on the wisdom inherited from Alba to survive. Moreno-Garcia (The Seventh Veil of Salome, 2024) immerses readers in multiple settings; the shifting perspectives keep the tension high as the book barrels to the final confrontation. It's a thoroughly enjoyable book about power, privilege, dark magic, and the capacity for stories to transcend them all. Recommend to readers who enjoyed witchy novels such as Alexis Henderson's The Year of the Witching (2020) or V. Castro's Goddess of Filth (2021) as well as gothic horror like Caitlin Starling's The Death of Jane Lawrence (2021) or T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead (2022).
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With this equally spooky and sophisticated horror novel, bestseller Moreno-Garcia (The Seventh Veil of Salome) proves she's as adept playing in the tropes of dark academia as any of the other subgenres she's tried on. Grad student Minerva Contreras should be living her dream life, researching pioneering weird fiction author Beatrice Tremblay at New England's Stoneridge College, where Tremblay herself studied, and where rumor has it her most famous novel found its inspiration. In 1934, Tremblay's charismatic Spiritualist roommate, Virginia Somerset, disappeared after claiming she was being stalked by evil otherworldly creatures. As Minerva walks in Tremblay's footsteps and meets those who knew her, the events described in her journals begin to feel familiar: first they bring to mind the stories Minerva's great-grandmother, Alba, told of the terrible witchcraft that befell her in her youth, and then they seem to happen again, this time to Minerva. She will need all the wisdom of Tremblay and Alba to escape Virginia's fate. Moreno-Garcia toggles between the gothic, über-privileged world of Stoneridge and the harsh reality of life in Alba's Mexican village, keeping readers in the dark about how they connect, and then pulls the threads together in a searing finale. It's as unsettling as it is unputdownable. (July)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This ambitious multigenerational horror concoction breathes magic into the witchcraft trope. Grad student Minerva Contreras is researching the life and works of weird-fiction author Beatrice Tremblay. Minerva is particularly interested in Tremblay's The Vanishing and the disappearance of Beatrice's roommate Virginia, which inspired that novel. As Minerva dives deeper into the mystery of Virginia's disappearance, she is tormented by supernatural forces that remind her of tales her Nana Alba used to tell about witches. Moreno-Garcia (The Seventh Veil of Salome) demonstrates her writing talent by weaving and gliding among this book's three narratives: Minerva trying to solve the mystery in modern times; Beatrice exploring the events leading up to Virginia's disappearance in the 1930s; and Alba's own encounter with sorcery as a young woman. She does this while keeping listeners engaged in all three stories; furthermore, narrator Chípe's vocal skills allow the women to be separate but memorable protagonists. These three strong women characters, along with the story's consistency regarding witchcraft lore, help this tale span multiple generations with ease. VERDICT Fans of slow-burn academic horror, such as Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and Stephen Graham Jones's The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, will fall under this story's spell.--James Gardner
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own. Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia's latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she "preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends," and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she's writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime,The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice's acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice's personal papers, which contain the author's account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird--she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what's happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it's impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America's most exciting authors. Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
