Disturbance

May 22, 2023
Poet Clake (The Museum of Ice Cream) makes her fiction debut with an eerie tale following an unnamed narrator who has recently left an abusive relationship. Alone in her new apartment, she listens in on her neighbors through the thin walls, especially Chelsea, the teenage girl next door who is dealing with her own boyfriend problems. With the help of her friend Jess, Chelsea turns to mystical ways of handling the breakup. While the narrator finds herself drawn further into Chelsea’s drama, she also comes to believe that her new apartment is haunted. Scratching, banging, and other sounds permeate the space, along with strange smells and figures in the shadows. As the narrator, too, turns to witchcraft and joins with the teenagers in their efforts, things spiral out of control. This witchy plot benefits from allusions to its pop culture antecedents, including The Craft, and Clake’s artful juxtaposition of the narrator’s memories of her past relationship with the haunting in the present sheds light on the lingering effects of trauma. Fans of literary horror will want to snatch this up.

June 10, 2024

Poet Clake's (Museum of Ice Cream) fiction debut may initially remind listeners of the '90s movie The Craft, but it quickly veers into more harrowing subject matters. Having escaped an abusive relationship, the novel's unnamed narrator espies teenage witches Chelsea and Jess casting a spell on Chelsea's boorish ex. The narrator befriends the girls and joins them, hoping to use magic to banish her own ex from her life. Soon, strange phenomena, including disturbing smells and shadowy figures, visit her apartment, and she wonders if her spell unleashed more than she anticipated. Listeners expecting spectacular magical effects will be disappointed; to create a foreboding and claustrophobic atmosphere, Clake instead relies on lyrical descriptions to illustrate the narrator's increasing dread, a dread that Catrin Walker-Booth's breathy voice makes palpable. Ultimately, the book's power comes from the narrator's memories of the physical and psychological abuse she endured and the depiction of how her ex's emotional manipulation gradually warped her sense of self. VERDICT Though the subject matter is disturbing, Clake's window into the horror wrought by abusive relationships resonates. A haunting literary horror for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties.--James Gardner

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