A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. As in the other series installments, she also argues that one’s real or perceived flaws can prove to be a source of strength despite, or even because of, the pain they cause to oneself and others.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. In this novel, she examines the thin line separating heroes from monsters-and then blurs that line completely. McGuire ( Middlegame, 2019, etc.) specializes in lending equal richness to her worldbuilding and her characterizations these are real people dumped into fantastical situations. Accompanied by her twice-resurrected lover, Alexis, and several students, Jack goes home to her beloved world of the Moors, a blood-tinged and gothically gloomy mashup of Stoker, Shelley, and Lovecraft, to confront her narcissistic, body-stealing twin while her schoolmates must dodge the Moors’ deadly traps and haunting temptations. The resurrected can’t become vampires, so Jill plans to use her sister’s more vital body for that purpose. Jack has obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifests in a pathological fear of being dirty, physically and mentally, and can’t be comfortable in Jill’s mass-murdering body, and 2.

This state of affairs is distressing for two main reasons: 1. Meanwhile, Jill's mind inhabits Jack's still-living flesh, thanks to a coerced body-swap instigated by Jill's vampire master. Jack isn’t quite who she was when she first left she’s presently stuck in the resurrected body of Jill, whom Jack had previously killed in order to put an end to Jill’s targeted slaughter campaign at the school. Through a door etched by lightning, Jack reappears at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a refuge for those children who found a portal to one of many magical worlds but couldn’t cope when they wound up back on Earth again.

The ghoulishly dysfunctional Wolcott twins-mad scientist Jack and her sister, Jill, who aspires to be a vampire-return for the fifth Wayward Children novel ( In an Absent Dream, 2019, etc.).

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire