Few in sleepy Sumner’s Mills have stumbled across the Octagon House hidden deep in the woods. Even fewer are brave enough to trespass. A man had killed his wife and two young daughters there, a shocking, gruesome crime that the sleepy upstate New York town tried to bury. One summer night, an emboldened fourteen-year-old Clare and her best friend, Abby, ventured into the Octagon House. Clare came out, but a piece of Abby never did.
Twenty years later, an adult Clare receives word that Abby has attempted suicide at the Octagon House and now lies in a coma. With little to lose and still grieving after a personal tragedy, Clare returns to her roots to uncover the darkness responsible for Abby’s accident.
When Clare was a teen, she and her friends snuck into the Octagon House, a crumbling structure in the woods with a dark history and rumored to be cursed. Her best friend Abby was briefly trapped in the cellar and whatever she saw there cast a dark shadow over the rest of her life.
Clare has tried to forget the past, and has mostly succeeded at doing so until the cryptic messages from her former friend Abby induce nightmares. Her life is already unsettled when she is contacted by Abby's mother, telling her that Abby is hospitalized after a suicide attempt in the Octagon House and asking that she come to see her.
Written on multiple timelines the story kind of bounced from present day Clare as an adult, to Clare as a teen, to way back when the house was first being built, and then forward to the only family who ever lived in it. It's a slow burn, told from multiple points of view, and is more of a mystery than a haunted house story. There's not really much in the way of scares but there is a lot of suspense. I was enjoying the story immensely until something that seemed out of character happened near the end. I can't say what it was without spoiling the whole book for you but something happened that seemed almost to defeat the whole purpose of the previous goings on. If not for that I probably would have rated it 5 stars.
4 out of 5 stars
I received an advance copy for review.
About the author
Jennifer Fawcett holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her work has been produced in theaters across the country and published in Third Coast Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Storybrink, and in the anthology Long Story Short. Her debut novel, Beneath the Stairs comes out with Atria Books (Simon & Schuster) in February 2022. She teaches writing at Skidmore College.
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