Twenty years ago, 18-year-old Joanne Neilson, local celebrity for her feats on the swim team, left the house to take the family dog on a walk through the woods. The dog came home; Joanne did not. Now, the remaining Neilson siblings - loner Aggie, family man Alex, and Bailey - estranged from the others due to his plans for a true crime docuseries about the disappearance - are led back to those same woods by a videotape showing an impossible recording of the day their family was broken apart. Keating imbues this novella with a fantastic sense of place. This is a region Keating knows well, and she blends that knowledge with a clear love of nature and an inventive streak. The weird woods of Cannon Park - so named for the regular booming of the tide in the caverns beneath - are realised with enough grounding and clarity that the emergence of clearly unnatural phenomena becomes truly unsettling. Mixing in real-world strange landmarks, like magnetic hills, is inspired, blurring the distincti
I want to preface this by saying that I don't live in the US, and am not under constant threat of gun violence. My partner does and is, and I am constantly scared for her, but I understand that a US reader will be coming to this with a context that I don't have, and I'm trying to be aware of that. What would you do if you knew that your actions truly had no consequences? If you knew that, no matter what you did, you would wake up tomorrow and everything would be back to normal? Carson Winter's The Guts of Myth (part of Split Scream Volume 1 , reviewed here) was a blend of gravel-crunching pulp and shimmering obsidian cosmic horror, a darkly majestic, savagely cool novelette. And while his name was the first thing to grab my attention with this novella, the concept cemented this as something I needed to read. Here it is: two office drones find that certain days are less 'real' than others. On these 'low tide' days, the abnormal is slightly more normal,