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Richo Reviews: Agony's Lodestone by Laura Keating (Tenebrous Press, 2023)

 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 distinction between what is natural and what is, distinctly, unnatural.

More than the landscape, though, the core of this story is the family dynamic, explored between their contemporary interactions and a series of flashbacks to when the siblings were children. They seem at first like loose sketches - the dedicated father who tries to be there for his sister too, the shut-in who tolerates her brother checking in on her for his sake as much as for hers, the tearaway screwup. But through the way they act and speak with one another, the memories they share and the old arguments they rehash, they emerge as well-realised portraits of people in tension between their past pain and their present struggles, their love for one another and all the distance that has built between them.

Keating's prose is effective, and at points truly brilliant. I think through these reviews I'm learning that I enjoy a more stylised mode of writing than is on display here, but I can't deny the beauty of some of the powerful turns of phrase Keating employs to evoke grief, turmoil, intense emotion and inner revelation. Combined with the skillful portrayal of family relationships, her writing creates a strong emotional anchor that makes the weirdness much weightier, and drives the reader towards a climax that fits perfectly.

Agony's Lodestone is a strong piece of emotionally powerful and very creepy horror writing, and I'll certainly look forwards to Keating's future work.

I can't let you go, though, without mentioning that the novella is dotted with illustrations by Trevor Henderson, which are true to form - that is, eerie, unsettling, and imaginative. But I probably didn't need to tell you that.

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