Matthew Jackson

FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Review by Matthew Jackson

Every new Haruki Murakami book is an event, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls has a special importance for longtime readers of the Japanese master. This weighty tome is not just his first novel in six years, but also a return to one of his earliest works: 1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the book’s afterword, Murakami relates how he reworked the ideas of that early book, reflecting on 40 years of writing life in the process. Without giving too much of this glorious novel away, what emerges from those four decades of thought is a striking, moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways. 

The unnamed narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a man caught between reality and an alternate world dominated by a strange Town surrounded by an impenetrable wall. When we meet this narrator, he’s reminiscing about both a teenage romance with an odd ending and the Town itself, which he once visited to work in a dark library as a Dream Reader. With the love story from his youth and his time in the Town dominating his mind, he sets out to change his life and find fulfillment working in a new, more conventional library. 

Many things about Murakami’s work are striking, but what stands out most when you dive into this book is his unmatched narrative patience. He does not rely on breakneck pacing to drive you from page to page. Instead, he moves the story forward steadily, with a confidence and wit that keeps you longing to read on. In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend to hear them tell a very strange story. It’s another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.

Haruki Murakami’s latest masterwork, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, is a moving meditation on the price of isolation, the nourishment of stories and how the most important things in our lives reach us in slow, unexpected ways.
Science Fiction & FantasyHorror

The Queen

Review by Matthew Jackson

With his breakthrough 2014 novel, The Troop, which was one of the most acclaimed horror novels of the last decade, Nick Cutter established himself as a writer of propulsive, muscular, unrelenting journeys into terror. His latest book, The Queen, reaffirms his place as one of the genre’s most entertaining storytellers, delivering a creature feature and the story of a doomed friendship in one unputdownable package.

Told over the course of a single day, the novel follows Margaret Carpenter, a young woman still reeling from the disappearance of her best friend, Charity Atwater. Margaret wakes up to find that an iPhone has been mysteriously delivered to her doorstep, and it begins pinging with messages from someone claiming to be her vanished friend. The Queen soon descends into something even darker, as Margaret embarks on a journey to find Charity and get to the bottom of an increasingly violent mystery that’s gripping their small town. 

Cutter wastes no time in throwing Margaret into the deep end, and the book moves like a freight train even when he’s pulling off some surprisingly tender moments between characters. Margaret’s narration is crisp, relatable and full of the kind of urgency that you’d expect from a someone in such an extreme situation, but Cutter’s great gift is his ability to go beyond that, to build a world even as he’s building a character. There are no trade-offs in his prose, no sense that we’re slowing down to lay the groundwork for something that’ll come next. It’s all multipurpose, expertly designed to keep you turning the pages as the book’s horrors grow deeper.

As for those frights, many of which involve a fascination with insects and how they interact with the natural world, Cutter is once again in top form. If you loved the body horror of The Troop, you’re going to get that in spades, along with an element of Promethean, sci-fi terror that’s almost cosmic in its levels of dread—and, of course, buckets of gore.

Because of these ingredients, and so many more, The Queen is a must-read for horror fans, for Nick Cutter fans and for anyone hoping to stay up late with a good scary yarn.

The Queen reaffirms Nick Cutter’s place as one of the horror genre’s most entertaining storytellers.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

Ruined a Little When We Are Born

Review by Matthew Jackson

The first thing you’ll notice when you open Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Ruined a Little When We Are Born is just how many stories she’s managed to pack into this slim volume. There are more than three dozen of them, some running less than two pages as part of her continued practice of flash fiction, others running to more conventional short fiction lengths, all of them united by common themes of family, femininity and motherhood. 

Rooted in the Indian diaspora, many of the stories in Ruined a Little When We Are Born are centered on rituals of one kind or another, ranging from the mundane to the arcane. In the opening story, “Mother, False,” a girl experiences shocking physical changes upon the death of her mother. In “Shabnam Salamat,” the arrival of her father’s new young bride sparks an awakening in a daughter. In the bewitching “There Are Places That Will Fill You Up,” a girl connects with her long-lost mother in a search for new meaning, with surprising results. And in “Milky-Eyed Orgasm Swallows Me Whole,” a woman has a conversation with the physical manifestation of her sexual climaxes.

Through beautifully constructed sentences that read as much like prayers as they do like prose, Zambrano’s stories slither and grow like unpredictable, invasive vines, creeping inside your brain and refusing to leave. It doesn’t seem to matter whether she gives herself 10 pages or just one; this is an author who understands that the job of fiction is to generate empathy and genuine emotional response in the reader, and who knows how to extract those things with poise and confidence. 

There’s a swagger to this book, a sense of being in gifted hands, and yet there’s also a dramatic vulnerability that comes through, particularly in the stories about growing up, learning what adulthood means or realizing that parents are not superheroes. Whether she’s exploring Indian folklore or introducing an old woman to the strange powers of a dishwasher, Zambrano is always in command, always writing earnestly and vividly. Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in this case, “art” is very much the key word.

Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, "art" is very much the key word.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

We Love the Nightlife

Review by Matthew Jackson

Quite often in fiction, the figure of the vampire has represented loneliness; readers are very accustomed to the particular kind of yearning that immortality and blood thirst can bring. We’ve seen it in the work of Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer and many more, but we’ve arguably never seen that sense of yearning quite the way Rachel Koller Croft portrays it in her new novel, We Love the Nightlife.

In Croft’s follow-up to her debut, the thriller Stone Cold Fox, the vampires of Nightlife are draped in yearning even as their never-ending revels mask what they really want. Croft’s protagonist, Amber, is frozen in her party girl prime, turned in the waning days of the 1970s by her maker, the beautiful and manipulative Nicola. Decades later, despite the comfortable life they share in a Victorian mansion, and Nicola’s ambition to open a new nightclub to be their personal playground, the old ways of doing things start to chafe at Amber. She begins to imagine what life might be like without Nicola, and considers what an escape plan might look like. But Nicola’s influence is powerful, her ambitions are vast and her appetite for control deeper than Amber ever imagined.

When we meet her, Amber is not physically alone, but she is lonely, trapped in a domineering friendship she’d rather leave, desperate for a way to change her circumstances and yearning for a different life. It’s a place most of us have been at some point or another, and despite her vampiric nature, Amber feels like one of us. This is mainly due to Croft’s skill; her conversational, warm and relatable prose depicts Amber not as a lonely monster, but as a person longing for freedom in a savage world covered in glitter and awash with pulsing music.

The real magic trick of the novel, though, is how Croft fleshes out the world beyond Amber’s view. Nicola’s perspective is also laced throughout the narrative, from her childhood more than a century earlier to her very particular desires in the present day. We get to see not just Nicola’s side of the story, but her own brand of yearning, giving the book an antagonist who’s not just remarkably well-developed, but human in her own twisted way. These dueling perspectives, coupled with memorable side characters and a beautifully paced plot, make We Love the Nightlife an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted breakup story that’s perfect for vampire fiction fans and fans of relationship drama alike.

We Love the Nightlife is an engrossing, darkly funny and twisted story about a friendship breakup—between two vampires.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

The Last Dream

Review by Matthew Jackson

In a career spanning more than five decades, writer and director Pedro Almodóvar has established himself as an endlessly versatile storyteller and a true emotional explorer. Whether he’s examining wrinkles in the nature of human sexuality or probing motherhood in its many forms, Almodóvar always manages to reveal kernels of compelling, often surprising, truth.

Now, in his first work of prose published in English, Almodóvar has turned that same deeply textured, boundless talent to short stories. The Last Dream, like all his work, jumps between genres, subjects and formats, with some stories playing with elements of memoir. In the title story, Almodóvar retells the events of the day his mother died, while in “A Bad Novel” and “Memory of an Empty Day,” he examines his own nature as a writer and an aging person who’s hungry for immersion in a world that’s changing around him. In “Adiós, Volcano,” he pays tribute to the late singer Chavela Vargas, a fixture in many of his films, and in “The Visit” he reveals the groundwork for his film Bad Education.

But the stories aren’t limited to Almodóvar’s own life and career. The more fantastical include “The Life and Death of Miguel,” a story which he tells us was written when he was quite young, in which he examines a Benjamin Button-esque world where life and death happen in reverse. In “Joanna, The Beautiful Madwoman,” he tells the story of a princess driven mad by circumstance. In “Confessions of a Sex Symbol,” he dives into the mind of a porn star, while in “The Mirror Ceremony,” he examines a vampire’s strange conversion.

The sheer depth and breadth of the collection is astonishing, and it’s made more astonishing by the economy of language. A slim volume of just a dozen stories, The Last Dream is light on embellishment or lengthy description. Almodóvar’s prose is lean but evocative, elegant but grounded, and translator Frank Wynne has done a remarkable job rendering it into stylish, beautifully spare English. Almodóvar’s characters, like those in his films, are full of yearning and wonder. Both for fans of great short fiction and for fans of the director, The Last Dream is a must-read.

Renowned director Pedro Almodóvar turns his deeply textured, boundless talent to 12 short stories involving elements of autobiography and fantasy in The Last Dream.
FictionPopular Fiction

The Life Impossible

Review by Matthew Jackson

In his bestselling 2020 novel, The Midnight Library, Matt Haig told the story of a woman, who, after deciding to end her life, finds herself transported to a new metaphysical plane in the form of a magical library. With his new book, Haig sticks to our ordinary world and makes it magical, which makes The Life Impossible an instantly engrossing, page-turning delight.

The Life Impossible begins with an email, a very ordinary thing, from a former student to retired math teacher Grace Winters. The student, now studying math at a university, shares his grief and despair, and Grace responds with kindness, then sets out to soothe the student’s aching soul by telling the story of a life-changing experience that recently happened to her. Her story, attached to the email as a manuscript, forms the rest of the novel.

A widow living a quiet life in England, Grace is surprised to receive word that a friend she hasn’t spoken to in decades has bequeathed her a house in Ibiza, Spain. Intrigued by the mystery of this gift, Grace heads to Ibiza to unravel the saga of how she came to be left the house, and to learn how her old friend died.

What she finds when she arrives is something much more complex than the unexpected inheritance. Grace, it seems, has been chosen for something that her rational math teacher’s mind struggles to understand, let alone embrace. As she draws closer to the secrets of her friend’s life, she comes to realize that Ibiza could change her own life, not just through its natural beauty and charming, energetic residents, but through a supernatural power.

Grace narrates the action not like a novelist, but like a human searching for meaning in the strangeness of her reality. Haig’s attention to detail and pacing never flags, and neither does his commitment to Grace’s voice, which is resonant with her insecurities, fears and confusion over what’s happening to her. This remarkable balance allows Haig to insert humor, heart and a kind of palpable power into the narrative, and it works extremely well. 

Even beyond the novel’s structural charms, of which there are many, The Life Impossible succeeds because of Haig’s ability to treat Grace’s journey not as a straight line, but as a vibrant interconnected web. As in our own lives, things that happened to Grace as a much younger woman ripple down through the decades, with often unexpected bearings on her present and the future she seeks. Though it deploys familiar fantastic elements, this is a book that refuses oversimplification through genre: It’s part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one’s self. Like the bright, yearning human being at its center, it pulses with life, which makes it well worth reading for anyone who wants a hopeful, warm, very human journey that crackles with magic.

Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible is part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one's self, and that makes it well worth reading for anyone seeking a hopeful, warm journey that crackles with magic.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

The Seventh Veil of Salome

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is magic in the work of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, even when the story she’s pursuing isn’t overtly magical. The genre-bending novelist (Mexican Gothic, Silver Nitrate) infuses every page with a sense of mythic power, ensuring that readers will be gripped, while also channeling the feeling of a fairy tale that could turn dark at any moment. With The Seventh Veil of Salome, Moreno-Garcia turns that remarkable gift to a Hollywood story and conjures another piece of prose magic.

Inspired by the biblical legend of Salome and its long cultural trail, the story focuses on three women. Vera Larios is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight when she nabs the leading role in The Seventh Veil of Salome, the latest sword-and-sandal epic to emerge from the Technicolor machine of 1950s Hollywood. Nancy Hartley, an aspiring actress who’s so far been consigned to bit parts, is instantly filled with fury, believing the role to be hers. Then there’s Salome herself, who is caught in the middle of a power struggle in the first century while falling in love with a mysterious and rebellious preacher who threatens to bring turmoil to Galilee.

As each narrative moves forward, Moreno-Garcia captures her characters’ strikingly vivid emotions—Vera’s longing for creative transcendence, Nancy’s lust for success and Salome’s tortured matrix of desire and duty—all while examining the power structures and influences, often male, that threaten to box them in. Each of these women wants something, and their desires and fears weave together across the story, driven by the evocative and carefully structured prose, which is so precise that it’s impossible to mistake one woman’s story for another even as they mirror and complement one another. Vera’s story is not Salome’s, even as she’s playing Salome. Neither is Nancy’s, even as her own desire for agency and power turns darker. Instead, Moreno-Garcia leads readers to question how the legend of Salome has informed our view of driven, creative, seductive, influential women through the ages. It’s an ambitious idea, and one the author captures without ever losing the book’s vivid drive.

The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.

The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Dissonance

Review by Matthew Jackson

Shaun Hamill’s fiction jolts the reader with an immediate sense of ambition, a sense that they are about to be not just immersed, but plunged into something enormous that nevertheless keeps a grip on its humanity. With his follow-up to A Cosmology of Monsters, The Dissonance, Hamill once again retains that massive scope while telling a deeply felt story of loss, love and a chance at redemption, solidifying his place as one of genre fiction’s brightest rising stars.

In their teenage years, Hal, Erin and Athena were introduced to an obscure and powerful magical system known as the Dissonance. They spent their high school summers being tutored by a local professor in their hometown of Clegg, Texas, learning the right way to wield the uncommon and often frightening power that stemmed from their own negative emotions. Then tragedy struck, leaving the trio missing a friend and separated by time, grief and a disconnection from the magic they once shared.

Two decades later, Hal, Erin and Athena reunite in Clegg as the 20-year memorial for the event that rent them apart looms and strange happenings rock the landscape around them. Together with a local teen named Owen, who is caught up in a supernatural mystery of his own, the trio hurtle toward something dark, something that could spell the end of everything or be the beginning of their path back from the brink.

Hamill’s story is packed with fantasy and horror delights, from dark rituals in cemeteries to monsters in the forest to powerful swords that were once thought to be merely mythical. The sense that these characters are caught in the midst of something much bigger than themselves, are being buffeted on all sides by something titanic, is immediate, thrilling and seductive. But even as supernatural weather and the realities of living in a magical world are ever present, the characters always come first. Hal, Athena and Erin emerge as fully formed people carrying heavy burdens that are simultaneously fantastical and relatable, their emotions nearly tangible thanks to Hamill’s direct and page-turning prose.

The Dissonance will hook you with its phantasmagoria of dark imagery, but it will keep you reading because it’s a story about how the shared traumas of our youths can both shape us and save us. It’s fantasy, horror, a coming-of-age journey and so much more.

A phantasmagoria of dark imagery that never loses sight of its human core, The Dissonance solidifies Shaun Hamill’s place as one of genre fiction's brightest rising stars.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Glassmaker

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is an immediate richness to the historical fiction of Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Remarkable Creatures), one that goes beyond carefully researched details and evocative prose, and into deep emotion. In her 12th book, The Glassmaker, Chevalier weaves a tapestry of character and conflict, change and stability, to create a story that elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental, while never losing sight of the tactile humanity that gives her work such pure, invigorating life.

The glassmaker of the title is Orsola Rosso, a young woman living on the island of Murano just off the coast of Italy next to Venice. When we meet Orsola, the Renaissance is in full swing, and Murano’s reputation as the “Island of Glass” means that her glassmaking family enjoys a stable, happy life. That all changes when Orsola’s father, the heart of the family, dies in an accident in their workshop, leaving his son unprepared to take over the business. With her family’s future in question, Orsola begins a secret glassmaking enterprise of her own, making beads over a burning lamp in a corner of the Rosso kitchen. What begins as a chance to earn some extra money soon turns into something more, as Orsola’s life, and the lives of those around her, are forever changed by her approach to her craft.

Chevalier, too, takes a uniquely impactful approach to her craft. Steeped in detail, The Glassmaker charts the history of Venice and the delicate balance of trade that keeps the glassmakers working. But instead of transpiring over decades, the Rosso family story stretches over centuries, with the same characters aging slowly while the world around them changes dramatically. Venice goes through wars, regime changes, plagues, political upheaval and much more, and all the while Orsola makes beads, and she and her family persevere.

Through her measured, passionate prose, Chevalier sinks us into this strange relationship with time, where the passage of years is as moldable and oozing as molten glass fresh from a furnace. The characters and their lives take on an almost meditative quality, and The Glassmaker becomes a study not just of history, but of what endures history. That makes it a potent, bewitching bright spot in a stellar career.

Tracy Chevalier’s 12th book is potent, bewitching and addictive as it elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Beautiful Days

Review by Matthew Jackson

There’s a quiet intensity to the way Zach Williams crafts short fiction, like a coiled spring ready to snap, or a snake about to strike. You can sense tension lurking like a camouflaged animal in the careful prose and dreamy strangeness of the worlds Williams builds.

In Beautiful Days, his first collection, Williams delivers intensity on page after page, but it’s how he uses the tension he creates that makes the work so remarkable. In stories that take the mundane to wondrous, frightening and deeply affecting places, Williams keeps finding new ways to remind us of the strangeness of being human, and the many ways our lives can transform in an unexpected instant.

There are no real limits to the subject matter of the 10 tales within this volume. The settings shift from skyscrapers to secluded cabins, seductive bedrooms to the quiet house next door. The characters are parents, roommates, neighbors, co-workers, even mice whose lives hang in the balance of another character’s quest for the right trap. In “Trial Run,” a man visits his office amid a snowstorm, only to find a storm of a different kind waiting inside. In “Red Light,” a sexually adventurous fitness buff finds himself in a particularly mysterious bedroom. And in “Wood Sorrel House,” which might be the most unsettling short story you read in all of 2024, new parents find themselves in a house outside of time, watching in horror as their baby refuses to age even as their own bodies fail.

Many of these stories push their subjects into the realm of the unreal, the supernatural and even the horrific, but genre conventions do not concern Williams any more than neat endings do. What’s most striking about Beautiful Days is not the premises of the stories, but the way in which the author lets them unfold at their own quirky pace, like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons. His prose is precise, witty and full of vivid imagery, dropping us into 10 distinct worlds that might all be part of the same dreamy landscape, or might be individual pocket universes. Either way, we can get lost, because Williams has a gift for marrying tension and humanity that calls to mind John Cheever or Shirley Jackson. That makes Beautiful Days a powerful, unsettling, genuinely thrilling collection, one that singles Williams out as a must-read voice in fiction.

Zach Williams lets each of these 10 short stories unfold at their own quirky pace—like alien insects inching their way out of cocoons.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Spoiled Heart

Review by Matthew Jackson

Some writers have a gift for making ordinary lives as compelling as anything you’d find in an epic adventure. This ability to chart the human condition goes beyond technical proficiency or what we’d generally consider literary merit. Sunjeev Sahota has this gift, and his latest novel, The Spoiled Heart, wrings maximum emotional impact out of a seemingly unremarkable life. 

The Spoiled Heart centers on Nayan, a working-class man living in England who was devastated by a tragic loss two decades earlier. Ever since, Nayan has thrown himself into his union, and into caring for his aging father. He’s never wanted much of a romantic life, until the standoffish and oddly beguiling Helen Fletcher returns to town. Nayan finds himself drawn to Helen, even as she seems determined to push him away, and as a union election threatens to consume his world. What draws Nayan to Helen? What drives him to keep pushing, both for her and for success as a union leader? What makes a man like Nayan tick? 

These are the questions that Sahota’s narrator, an acquaintance and eventual friend of Nayan’s, sets out to answer, and it’s through this narrator’s eyes that the particular brilliance of The Spoiled Heart becomes clear. By framing Nayan’s story through the eyes of another storyteller, Sahota digs deep into the psyche of his protagonist, while asking provocative questions about whose story this really is and how much of it is true. There’s an element of voyeurism that lends something thrilling and incisive to the whole story.

Sahota’s prose is as precise, confident and startlingly wise when describing the depths of tragedy as the banalities of a transaction in a local shop. Nayan’s internal life, as a broken man who’d rather fix others than himself, is rendered in powerful, stealthily profound sentences, and all the while it’s accompanied by the sense that the author is building to something bigger, darker and more revelatory. When Sahota finally reaches that moment in The Spoiled Heart‘s final pages, it feels both shattering and strangely inevitable.

The Spoiled Heart is one of those books that will take root quickly and grow in your soul. It’s another powerful achievement for Sahota, and a novel that even readers who are leery of contemporary realism will enjoy.

Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart wrings maximum emotional impact out of a seemingly ordinary life, with an element of voyeurism that lends something thrilling and incisive to the narrative.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Hunted

Review by Matthew Jackson

In the last two decades, the world of entertainment, books and beyond has been absolutely saturated with terrorism thrillers. The genre wasn’t exactly obscure before, but in the years since 9/11, we’ve seen an ongoing boom in a subgenre that, at this point, seems to have run out of surprises. Until, of course, the right storyteller comes along.

Sweeping, emotional and driven by a powerful ensemble of characters from all walks of life, Abir Mukherjee’s Hunted seeks to meld the personal and the political, the global and the local, and most importantly, the emotional and the procedural. It’s an ambitious offering, even for an acclaimed historical mystery author, which makes the book’s ability to meet its own high standards that much more impressive.

The narrative follows a group of disparate figures, all of whom have some connection to the bombing of a shopping mall in Los Angeles. Over the course of roughly one week, Hunted follows an FBI agent on the trail of the extremists responsible for the attack, a former U.S. serviceman who’s been radicalized in his own way, a young woman roped into a movement she might not fully grasp and, most powerfully, two parents from opposite sides of the world, both hoping to save their children from the grip of a terrorist plot of epic proportions.

That plot and its stakes are capably unspooled over the course of Hunted‘s 400 pages, and it’s clear from the beginning that Mukherjee knows how to marshal his talents as a seasoned mystery writer and bring them to bear on a narrative of this scope. His prose is sharp, brisk and moves at an appropriately breakneck pace, delivering the goods for anyone who’s looking for something that rockets them along with tight plotting and juicy twists.

But that plotting, solid though it is, is not what really makes Hunted work. That honor goes to the way Mukherjee is able to expertly blend action with genuinely emotional character work, even though not all of his characters are created equal in terms of the grip they have on the reader. Hunted is, at its core, a book about people who feel like the systems around them have let them down, and how they each respond to that disappointment. It’s a story of regrets, retribution and redemption, set within a truly epic thriller.

Abir Mukherjee’s sweeping, emotional and epic Hunted proves the terrorism thriller isn’t dead.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Fervor

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is a daring hybrid quality to Toby Lloyd’s Fervor, a sense of branching interests that might doom another, less focused book. In his debut novel, Lloyd explores a wide array of emotional and philosophical topics, from the influence of God to the duties of a memoirist to the characteristic wrinkles of family dysfunction. In the process, he also merges a family saga with a coming-of-age story, a metaphysical exploration and even an outright horror novel. It’s a lot to pack into less than 300 pages, but Lloyd pulls it off, announcing himself as an exciting voice to watch. 

Fervor follows the Rosenthal family, a devout Jewish household rocked by the loss of their patriarch, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor who’s recently divulged his life story to his daughter-in-law Hannah, the family’s resident writer. Every member of the family—from Yosef’s son, Eric, to his grandsons, Gideon and Tovyah—has their own feelings about Hannah’s project, but in the end it’s Yosef’s granddaughter, Elsie, who is impacted the most. After her grandfather dies, Elsie starts to act out, visibly suffering in ways that frustrate her teachers and her parents. When Elsie suddenly disappears one day, then reappears in a disheveled, dazed state, Hannah suspects that something supernatural has entered her daughter, upsetting the family’s balance of power and threatening their sanity.

Lloyd frames the story of Elsie’s unraveling in several ways, ranging from third-person storytelling that looms over the entire family, to Hannah’s written account, to sections from the point of view of Tovyah’s college friend, who witnesses the Rosenthals’ strangeness firsthand. In spreading the story out across these perspectives, and even across years of family history, Lloyd invites readers to ask whose version of the narrative is actually the truth. Hannah’s presence as the family’s self-appointed chronicler adds to the dramatic tension, propelling events forward with her ferocious longing for secret knowledge that heightens the stakes of the book’s questions of faith and reason.

But even beyond the structural cleverness and the way it plays with perspective, Fervor succeeds on the strength of Lloyd’s elegant, confident language. The book is driven by a constant push-pull between the sacred and secular, and Lloyd’s prose reflects that with sentences that feel like they could simultaneously conjure up a spirit and captivate a very human audience. His voice is practiced, smart and spellbinding, making Fervor a book that fans of family dramas and horror stories alike will happily devour.

Toby Lloyd’s voice is practiced, smart and spellbinding, making Fervor a book that fans of family dramas and horror stories alike will happily devour.

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