Ann Fraistat’s deliciously creepy, highly inventive YA gothic horror novel A Place for Vanishing has a killer first line: “Days like this made me wish I’d never come back from the dead.” It just gets better from there—at least for readers who revel in cleverly conceived supernatural horror, from scary seances to oodles of sinister, clickety-clackety insects. For 16-year-old Libby Feldman, 13-year-old Vivi and their mom, not so much.
It was certainly a relief that their mom’s childhood home, Madame Clery’s House of Masks—a grand Victorian replete with blue roses and a hedge maze in the backyard—was vacant and available to give the family a fresh start after Libby’s recent suicide attempt. Libby has since been diagnosed with bipolar III disorder and is benefiting from medication and therapy, but newly delicate family dynamics have her on edge, and she’s baffled over why her mom thought moving into a haunted house was a good idea.
Founded in 1894, the House of Masks has been linked to numerous disappearances over the decades, and Libby’s grandparents died there. It’s filled with disturbing sounds and bizarre details, like beautiful but deeply unsettling stained glass windows depicting various insects—ants, moths, cicadas, wasps and more—surrounding human-like figures with voids for eyes.
Despite her doubts, Libby’s determined to ignore the you-should-flee signals her gut is sending, since, “I’d caused a lot of misery lately. I owed it to Mom and Vivi to make them feel good.” But urgent questions soon arise: Why is her mom behaving oddly and drinking cup after cup of blue-rose tea? Are the masks dangling from the windows as weird as she thinks they are, and why is Vivi so casual about wearing one? Handsome neighbor Flynn knows a lot about the house but is reluctant to share details. What is he—and the house—hiding?
As in her Bram Stoker Award-nominated debut novel, What We Harvest, Fraistat does a masterful job of balancing supernatural goings-on, psychological suspense and complicated relationships. She writes about the effects of trauma with sensitivity and care in this eminently entertaining horror tale rife with thrills, chills and heart.
