Why You'll Love This
A Vermont farmhouse, a dead woman's hidden diary, and the terrible question of what some mothers will do to keep their children from staying dead.
- Great if you want: dual-timeline ghost stories rooted in grief and rural isolation
- The experience: eerie and propulsive — dread builds quietly, then refuses to let go
- The writing: McMahon weaves timelines tightly, letting each reveal reframe the other
- Skip if: you prefer psychological horror over supernatural elements
About This Book
West Hall, Vermont, carries the kind of cold that settles into the bones and doesn't leave — and Jennifer McMahon uses that chill to brilliant effect in this atmospheric thriller that moves between 1908 and the present day. When nineteen-year-old Ruthie discovers her mother has vanished from their isolated farmhouse, she uncovers a hidden diary belonging to Sara Harrison Shea, a woman who died under dark circumstances a century earlier. What begins as a missing persons mystery quickly opens into something far older and stranger, rooted in grief, loss, and the desperate lengths people will go to hold on to those they've loved.
McMahon structures the novel across two timelines with a precision that keeps the tension coiling tighter with each chapter. Sara's diary entries feel genuinely period and genuinely haunted, while the present-day narrative moves at a pace that makes the book difficult to set down after dark. The prose is spare but never thin, letting the Vermont winter landscape do real atmospheric work. This is literary horror that earns its scares by first making you care deeply about the people in danger — both the living and, perhaps, the not quite dead.
