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lucymonster(Behold! A cute new ghost librarian icon for spooky reading specifically. I've uploaded some new horror movie themed icons, too. Gotta get the most out of my paid account.)
Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.
This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.
So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.
I had an "oh" moment when I reached the acknowledgements at the end and read that Jones rewrote the novel from the ground up multiple times. Every book I can recall reading where the author talks about multiple substantive rewrites has suffered in one degree or another from the same issues: flawed pacing, dropped leads, digressions from the main storyline that don't really pay off. This felt like it was trying to be three different books at once: a deconstructed teen slasher, a straight-faced supernatural horror, and an elevated "the real horror is trauma" story. With a bit more focus, I can see those three elements coming together really well! Instead, it often felt like different sections belonged to different versions of the book with different opinions on what the ratio of ingredients should be.
My biggest issue was with an unusual technique that Jones actually used twice: revealing a major twist early, then spending the rest of the novel trying to convince us the reveal was false and there was actually something much more complicated coming, only for it to then turn out at the very end that the first reveal was true after all. This was clever and all, but for me it really dissipated the tension (tension being one of the main emotions I like to feel when reading horror!) and made a large amount of what happened in the middle feel wasted.
We're shown very early on that the killer is going to be a supernatural entity called the Lake Witch. Now, the Lake Witch is legitimately terrifying: she's an undead eight-year-old kid with her jaw ripped off, who walks on the surface of the lake because the hallowed Christian ground on which the dam was originally built won't admit her beneath the water. She is trying to rest in peace with her dead mother and reacts explosively to disturbances such as, for instance, a major construction project going up along her shoreline. Jade knows the local legend of the Lake Witch (and the beautifully sinister, Freddy-esque children's rhyme that goes with her) but is sure, for reasons she uncharacteristically never quite manages to convincingly explain within her own narrative, that the true evil will be mundane rather than supernatural. So instead of building up the dread around this great Lake Witch character, Jones spends most of the rest of the novel dragging us along on a wild goose-chase looking for a mundane culprit behind the murders. There's a giant grizzly bear that may or may not be involved in one of the deaths - that never really pays off. One of the new settlement tycoons appears to have started committing his own unrelated murder rampage towards the end - that also never really pays off. There's a fantastically scary bit towards the end where Jade is being chased across the lake by multiple potential killers and we don't know which one of them it's going to be - but then in the end it's just the Lake Witch, who we knew about from the start but haven't seen since. It didn't feel like a shocking twist. It felt like a letdown.
The other big reveal is that Jade's father raped her as a child. This was quite obvious from early on and in fact was called out explicitly by another character about halfway through the novel, but Jade vehemently, convincingly denies it and we spend the rest of the novel in this sort of semi-comedic standoff where Jade's small handful of friends are convinced that the now obviously real slasher murders are just Jade's metaphorised cry for help while Jade exasperatedly rebuffs them...right up until the end, in the frenzy of the final massacre scene, where Jade finally admits that the rape did happen after all. And then very satisfyingly kills her dad using the chaos as cover - I loved that part! I just, again, felt like the tension had been dissipated somewhat, and like it would have had more impact if the novel itself was honest with us about its mid-reveal being true, even if Jade wasn't ready to personally admit it.
On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.
Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is a half-Blackfeet girl living with her abusive father in a small lakeside town in Idaho. Alienated and lonely, she retreats into slasher movies, fantasising vividly about a real-life slasher villain someday appearing to tear up the town she hates. But then a community of uberwealthy developers and media moguls move into a new luxury settlement in the national park across the lake, bringing with them a daughter Jade's age who turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the slasher genre's Final Girl archetype; bodies start washing up, killed in mysterious ways, and Jade becomes convinced that her fantasy is at last coming true.
This is - oh, man. I LOVED this book. Jones does not for one second allow the fact that he is a middle-aged man to interfere with the overwhelmingly authentic troubled-teenage-girlness of Jade as a protagonist. I know this girl. I'm friends with this girl. I literally went to school with this girl, or at least, a few different girls who add up to her. Her viewpoint is blinkered by all the petty adolescent foibles you'd expect as well as the much darker stuff, and it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all. She remains fervently committed to the world she has constructed for herself in a way only kids of this almost-worldly, I-know-it-all-now age can be - which makes it all the more impactful when she and the adults both turn out to be completely right, in ways that should be fundamentally incompatible but somehow aren't.
So, yeah. The character work and overall handling of narrative themes in this novel are among the best I've read in ages. I am therefore all the more inclined to nitpick its structural flaws, because (to reduce things to a simplified Goodreads rating system) I really badly wanted this to be a five-star book but could only in good faith award it four. Which still puts it well inside my "heartily recommend" bracket by any measure! If you haven't read it but think you might like to, please add my name to the list of people who've recced it to you and stop reading here. What follows will be both spoiler-riddled and comparatively far less important than the book's strengths.
I had an "oh" moment when I reached the acknowledgements at the end and read that Jones rewrote the novel from the ground up multiple times. Every book I can recall reading where the author talks about multiple substantive rewrites has suffered in one degree or another from the same issues: flawed pacing, dropped leads, digressions from the main storyline that don't really pay off. This felt like it was trying to be three different books at once: a deconstructed teen slasher, a straight-faced supernatural horror, and an elevated "the real horror is trauma" story. With a bit more focus, I can see those three elements coming together really well! Instead, it often felt like different sections belonged to different versions of the book with different opinions on what the ratio of ingredients should be.
My biggest issue was with an unusual technique that Jones actually used twice: revealing a major twist early, then spending the rest of the novel trying to convince us the reveal was false and there was actually something much more complicated coming, only for it to then turn out at the very end that the first reveal was true after all. This was clever and all, but for me it really dissipated the tension (tension being one of the main emotions I like to feel when reading horror!) and made a large amount of what happened in the middle feel wasted.
We're shown very early on that the killer is going to be a supernatural entity called the Lake Witch. Now, the Lake Witch is legitimately terrifying: she's an undead eight-year-old kid with her jaw ripped off, who walks on the surface of the lake because the hallowed Christian ground on which the dam was originally built won't admit her beneath the water. She is trying to rest in peace with her dead mother and reacts explosively to disturbances such as, for instance, a major construction project going up along her shoreline. Jade knows the local legend of the Lake Witch (and the beautifully sinister, Freddy-esque children's rhyme that goes with her) but is sure, for reasons she uncharacteristically never quite manages to convincingly explain within her own narrative, that the true evil will be mundane rather than supernatural. So instead of building up the dread around this great Lake Witch character, Jones spends most of the rest of the novel dragging us along on a wild goose-chase looking for a mundane culprit behind the murders. There's a giant grizzly bear that may or may not be involved in one of the deaths - that never really pays off. One of the new settlement tycoons appears to have started committing his own unrelated murder rampage towards the end - that also never really pays off. There's a fantastically scary bit towards the end where Jade is being chased across the lake by multiple potential killers and we don't know which one of them it's going to be - but then in the end it's just the Lake Witch, who we knew about from the start but haven't seen since. It didn't feel like a shocking twist. It felt like a letdown.
The other big reveal is that Jade's father raped her as a child. This was quite obvious from early on and in fact was called out explicitly by another character about halfway through the novel, but Jade vehemently, convincingly denies it and we spend the rest of the novel in this sort of semi-comedic standoff where Jade's small handful of friends are convinced that the now obviously real slasher murders are just Jade's metaphorised cry for help while Jade exasperatedly rebuffs them...right up until the end, in the frenzy of the final massacre scene, where Jade finally admits that the rape did happen after all. And then very satisfyingly kills her dad using the chaos as cover - I loved that part! I just, again, felt like the tension had been dissipated somewhat, and like it would have had more impact if the novel itself was honest with us about its mid-reveal being true, even if Jade wasn't ready to personally admit it.
On the other hand, I don't know it's just because I acclimated myself to Jones' prose last year with The Only Good Indians, but I found this an easier, more aesthetically pleasing read. And the cover design is gorgeous in this very simple, distilled way that breezily outperforms many more elaborate confections. If I ever spot a copy of this book secondhand, I'm snapping it up because it will look lovely on my shelf, and also because I know it's one I'm going to want to read again down the line. I just love Jade so much.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 04:09 am (UTC)I think I didn't mind the "actually she was sexually assaulted" secondary reveal as much as you, just because we're so deep in her POV, and she wasn't willing to admit to herself what had happened, much less anyone else. It worked for me as part of her arc.
OTOH, I'm pretty sure several other people WERE running around murdering people. Like I think Letha's dad (iirc) really did go after at least one person with a nail gun? And I kind of think Hardy really did kill the punks who were responsible for the death of his daughter? Part of what makes me think this is that by the time we get to the third book in the trilogy, it's pure murderous chaos (to a degree that didn't really work for me). In general, I feel like Jones's plotting and reveals have maybe a bit too much sleight of hand that means things don't land with the right emotional weight, especially in later books in the series.
it's a big source of poignancy that we as adult readers can see the very different version of events being experienced by the few adults who care about Jade and are trying to help her, but she cannot see it at all.
It's SO TRUE. She clearly annoys the everloving shit out of everyone around her without even realizing it, even/especially the ones who are actually trying to care for her. And like you say, I love that no matter how hard on herself she is, the narrative has so much empathy for her. It's a really tricky balance that I very rarely see, especially for messy female characters like Jade.
I love her so much. ;___;
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 04:37 am (UTC)I think I didn't mind the "actually she was sexually assaulted" secondary reveal as much as you, just because we're so deep in her POV, and she wasn't willing to admit to herself what had happened, much less anyone else. It worked for me as part of her arc.
I'm glad it worked for you! I don't think it was a wrong choice, per se, and as you say, it makes sense for the character. I just - I guess personally I would have gotten more out of it emotionally if I could have sat with the heartbreak for the whole second half of the novel instead of having my heart break just briefly, being quickly assured it wasn't real, then having it come back real again at the last second.
OTOH, I'm pretty sure several other people WERE running around murdering people. Like I think Letha's dad (iirc) really did go after at least one person with a nail gun? And I kind of think Hardy really did kill the punks who were responsible for the death of his daughter?
Yeah, as far as I could track it, the final bodycount ends up being allocated roughly like:
- Theo Mondragon: shot down Mr Holmes' aircraft, killed the workers who witnessed it except for one who got away.
- Hardy: got that one guy chopped up by the boat's propellors.
- Grizzly bear: maybe ate one of the Founders??? Or else the Lake Witch killed him but the bear ate the body? I lost track of that one ngl.
- Jade and Letha: Jade's dad.
- Lake Witch: the two Dutch tourists, the guy who fell down that hole, everyone on the yacht, everyone else who dies in the final lake massacre except for Jade's dad.
But the first three points were all kind of jumbled and confusing to follow and to me felt mostly like distractions from the genuinely scary Lake Witch. I was, not annoyed exactly, but just slightly bummed tn end up feeling muddled rather than scared by the time it all came together.
Part of what makes me think this is that by the time we get to the third book in the trilogy, it's pure murderous chaos (to a degree that didn't really work for me). In general, I feel like Jones's plotting and reveals have maybe a bit too much sleight of hand that means things don't land with the right emotional weight, especially in later books in the series.
I'm undecided whether or not I want to read the rest of the trilogy. I keep feeling this way about horror - feeling satisfied by the ending of a given book or movie, then finding that it's just the first in a series or even a whole big franchise and idk, man, I don't TRUST sequels. I LIKE stories that stand alone. Then again, right now I'm seated in front of a horror buffet that feels impossibly large and so far mostly untasted; likely once I've finished this initial gorging phase, I'll start wanting to come back to the ones I really liked and continue with the sequels.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 04:41 am (UTC)I was extremely skeptical of there being more books after this first one, and I felt that skepticism was pretty well-founded after I'd read the other two. They get more chaotic as they go on and lose the tight focus on Jade that's so essential to the first one. OTOH, you do get more Jade! You get to see her grow as a person and heal from some things, and that's nice. So if you just want Moar Jade, there is indeed more, and I'm glad I read them once just for her. But probably I'll only ever reread the first one.