Neena Viel’s debut speculative novel, Listen to Your Sister, is both deliciously terrifying and belly laugh-inducing, offering fans of horror and dark comedy the ideal blend to keep them up all night.
After 25-year-old Calla Williams reluctantly becomes the legal guardian to her youngest brother, Jamie, she finds that taking care of a teenage sibling is a round-the-clock responsibility, as Jamie is constantly getting himself into trouble. It doesn’t help that their middle sibling, the put-together, well-meaning but often absent Dre, is off handling his own issues. Calla grows disillusioned as she realizes she is losing control over her life thanks to shouldering the weight of being a single mother in all but name. But perhaps the most frustrating thing is that Calla’s constant protectiveness and die-hard loyalty to her not-so-little brothers has ramped up the Nightmare, a series of labyrinthine dreams deep-rooted in family and personal trauma that she cannot escape and always end poorly for her brothers—until she wakes up in a cold sweat, screaming. When an unfortunate series of events force the Williams siblings to lie low in a creepy cabin in the woods, Calla is pushed to her breaking point, and Jamie and Dre soon learn how intensely their sister cares for them and the true cost of her repeated rescues.
Listen to Your Sister focuses on a different sibling of the trio every chapter, and Viel excels in getting under each of their skins to explore the emotions at stake. On the surface, Jamie’s identity seems to revolve around his life on the streets and work dealing illegal substances, but his steadfast belief in standing up for civil rights and Black lives shows readers a more caring, less self-obsessed facet to him. Likewise, Dre may complain about being overlooked as the middle sibling, but his closeness in age to Calla means he viscerally remembers their shared past—both the sentimental and the secret, scary moments. But Viel’s deepest expression of the strange but beautiful relationship between siblings is found in Calla’s chapters: Her powerful emotions radiate from the pages, a maelstrom of undying devotion, frustration, repulsion and love for her brothers.
In addition to supernatural horrors, the siblings also face the scariest and ugliest parts of modern society, from violence at protests to the racism and discrimination running rampant in their Seattle hometown. With a sharp sense of dark humor and a stunning voice—alongside some gruesome body horror scenes—Viel incorporates well-worn genre tropes in new ways and provides plenty of bloodcurdling surprises along the way.
