Why You'll Love This
A dead inventor's machine that speaks to the dead sounds absurd — until McMahon makes you genuinely afraid of what it might say.
- Great if you want: gothic family secrets wrapped in eerie small-town atmosphere
- The experience: unsettling and propulsive, with a dreamlike undercurrent throughout
- The writing: McMahon layers dread quietly — tension builds through accumulation, not shock
- Skip if: you want grounded realism — the supernatural premise is central, not subtle
About This Book
In a crumbling New England mill town shaped by loss and family secrets, Eva grows up believing her father's strange inventions might hold genuine power—including blueprints, allegedly stolen from Thomas Edison's own laboratory, for a machine that lets the living speak with the dead. When catastrophe shatters her family, Eva is left to survive on the margins, haunted by what the machine warned and what she couldn't prevent. McMahon builds her story around the kind of grief that doesn't announce itself cleanly—it leaks in through old photographs, inherited obsessions, and the eerie feeling that the past refuses to stay buried.
What makes Burntown absorbing as a reading experience is McMahon's control of atmosphere. She layers small-town gothic with psychological suspense, keeping the prose stripped and propulsive even as the emotional weight quietly accumulates. Multiple timelines and perspectives weave together without feeling mechanical, and her treatment of trauma—particularly across generations of women—gives the thriller architecture a surprisingly tender core. Readers drawn to place-driven, character-anchored suspense will find this one lingers well past the final page.
