My third venture into the works of popular author T. Kingfisher could be considered cozy horror, or suburban gothic (if that isn’t a thing I just made up). It starts out in a pretty classic way: Sam, a 30-something archeoentomologist, comes to stay at her mother’s suburban North Carolina home for a while and, of course, things don’t feel quite right. Her mother has made changes to the home, and speaks and acts differently from what Sam is expecting — not to mention there’s a vulture sitting on the mailbox. Thankfully for me (since I’m a chicken) the terror level of this story is mild, replaced instead by T. Kingfisher’s tone of slight and clever humour. Sam narrates the story with a kind of cheeky sarcasm that had me chuckling out loud many times, and perfectly suited the blend of white-picket charm and tabloid bizarreness throughout this story.

The book is not very long, but it takes its time with the clues and the teasing until way past the midpoint (a bit too much in my impatient opinion). Each short chapter seems to bring Sam a new clue, or a new semi-creepy incident or encounter that adds to the indisputable (at least to the reader) conclusion that majorly bad stuff is going on in this town and particularly in mom’s house. It’s a nice touch that we lean into Sam’s insect expertise as she notices something amiss with the bugs around (to put it mildly) and in the process, we get treated to many a bug fact (not to mention a lot of rose-related facts also) as part of the story.

Once we get the ball rolling, T. Kingfisher’s writing does an excellent job of bringing to life all the creepy, gross and surprisingly pretty things that are supposed to frighten us in this story. The characters are all fun and charming, in a stereotypically suburban US way. Also, the supernatural and magical aspects are written in a way that shows well T. Kingfisher’s day job as a celebrated fantasy author. 

The audiobook narration was done nicely, especially with Sam’s narration being chipper and sing-song in the right ways. The only issue I had, that kind of pulled me out a bit from the horror, was that the male characters were all voiced very similarly and sounded kind of like a Muppet with allergies trying to affect a gruff tone. It sounded a bit too comical for me to ever take something said by a male character seriously, but fortunately that didn’t harm the experience much.

Overall, this was a delightfully charming and not-very-scary canapé appetizer of a story that makes a nice start to spooky season.

3.5 stars

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