A desperate family confronts the mysteries that lie between life and death in this soul-gripping novel of supernatural suspense by Amazon Charts and New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice.
Claire Huntley and her brother, Poe, were on a midnight hike in Montana when the woods went wild. A blinding, devouring light and a rumbling pulse that blasted them off their feet left both kids with little memory of what happened. Their father insisted it was a violent extraterrestrial abduction; his wild obsession would tear their family apart in the wake of the trauma.
Fourteen years later, Claire, who’s battled anxiety attacks since that fateful hike, wants to heal her relationship with her brother, which has been damaged by his years of addiction. But only hours before their reunion, Poe’s crowded passenger plane plunges into the Colorado mountains. No one survives the fiery crash. In the midst of her grief, Claire accepts her estranged father’s request to join him in Montana, where he continues to investigate the paranormal force he believes altered his children down to their bones.
As they reunite, Claire’s anxiety attacks take on a new dimension. Is she experiencing hallucinations or visions? Is her brother’s presence in them a symptom of grief, or is she receiving messages from beyond life? The answers Claire and her father seek will take them on a breakneck journey deep into the Montana wilderness and the shadows of history, where they will unearth a secret force with terrifying implications for their family—and the world.
Mind-Bending Scifi Action. This is one of those trippy books that has enough mystery up front to draw you in, a lot of exposition in the middle to make you understand what is coming, and a balls to the wall back third to show off all that you now know within the context of the original setup. At 440 ish pages, it may read a tad long to some, but I felt the length was pretty solid for all that it was doing here. And the ideas it discusses are intriguing in a vein similar to Marcus Sakey's Afterlife, where death... may only be the beginning. The backstory here was perhaps a well tapped a bit too often in the genre, particularly for anything of this form, and yet was still done well and was truly horrifying (though fortunately not too much of it actually "onscreen"). Overall the tale here was interesting and well told. Very much recommended.
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6 May, 2022:
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