The passages are vibrant and forward-pressing, blessed with the energy that wells from a cast of mid-twenties characters with mid-twenties concerns, and I find myself struggling to put the book down

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.

This feels like something Buehlman needed to get out of his system; a residual interest in vampire stories after penning the exquisitely excellent Lesser Dead, coupled with a love of all the Americana that surrounds Route 66 a decade after its decline began.

The nameless indigenous peoples of Siberia we envision are pure in the mind of the Western writer, a canvas equally mystical and remote which doesn’t conjure up all the shadows we have to invite into the room when writing about the Apache, Blackfeet, or Navajo.

this iteration of [Nevill’s] formula feels like a polished, smartly-conceived story that plays out across a number of increasingly interesting layers.

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.