Ward understands the human relationships that underlie each passage, and seeds in her characters very real shortcomings that in time bear terrible fruit. The horror here is not fanged and leering, but that which lies at the heart of every person: the capacity to be horrendously cruel for a taste of crude power. It is a book where no one shines, and all victories are hard-won and bloody.

Every character, setting, and arc is an askew, asymmetrical thing that shuffles at the edge of the reader’s perception showing a side that does not match its shadow.