About This Book
Twenty years is a long time to build a life on top of a wound — but in A Flicker in the Dark, Stacy Willingham shows exactly how thin that foundation can be. Chloe Davis survived a childhood no one should have: a serial killer father, a shattered family, a Louisiana summer that left six girls dead and a community permanently scarred. She's since rebuilt herself into a psychologist, a fiancée, a functional adult. Then a local girl goes missing, and Chloe's carefully constructed present starts to buckle under the weight of the past. The central question — is history repeating itself, or is Chloe's trauma distorting her perception — is genuinely unsettling, because Willingham makes both possibilities feel equally plausible.
Willingham's debut is built on an unreliable narrator done right: not as a gimmick, but as a structural reflection of her protagonist's psychological state. The prose is restrained and precise, mirroring Chloe's professional composure even as the cracks spread beneath it. Willingham parcels out revelations with patience, letting dread accumulate slowly rather than relying on cheap shocks. Readers who like their thrillers psychologically grounded — where the horror is as much internal as external — will find this one difficult to set down.