Starred review from January 8, 2024
Starck (Noah’s Wife) terrifies and captivates in this profound meditation on the power of stories that doubles as a twisty and possibly supernatural mystery. Sylvia Gray once had the perfect life: a romantic marriage, a good job, and a lovely young daughter, Faye, who destroyed it all at age nine when she and a friend stabbed their babysitter multiple times. The two children claimed the Kingman, a mysterious and monstrous internet figure, inspired them to do it, but that doesn’t stop the girls from being “sent to separate detention centers, to be released when they turned eighteen.” Now, Faye, 21 and free, vanishes, leaving her toddler daughter behind. Sylvia, divorced, miserable, and estranged from everyone in her life, takes over custody of the child and is forcibly reminded that her own daughter is a mystery to her. What really happened all those years ago and where has Faye gone now? Seeking answers, Sylvia gathers everyone involved in the original incident to help find both her daughter and the rationale behind the worst thing that ever happened to them all. Starck’s prose is by turns gorgeous and unsettling, creating a dreamlike tale that slides effortlessly between fantasy and reality as it interrogates such themes as forgiveness, generational trauma, and the responsibilities and burdens of motherhood. This is sure to resonate.
February 15, 2024
Years after a crime, the mother of the child perpetrator faces monsters: her guilt, her scary daughter, and an evil creature called the Kingman. Opening with the transcript of a 911 call from 2008, when two 9-year-old girls stabbed their 16-year-old babysitter and left her in a ditch, Starck tells this spooky tale through a combination of documents and sections that unfold from the points of view of several characters. After Sylvia's daughter, Faye, and her best friend, Anna, pulled those art knives out of their backpacks, the subsequent trial and media sensation totally shattered Sylvia's family. Now, 23-year-old Faye has abandoned the toddler she became pregnant with while in custody and gone on the lam. Her disappearance coincides with a new wave of crimes possibly associated with the Kingman, a malevolent creature "who crept out of the Internet" to inspire children to acts of violence--a figure with whom Faye and Anna were fascinated. When Faye's baby gets dropped off with Sylvia, she calls in her estranged husband to babysit and goes to hunt down her daughter. As a thriller, the book is well constructed, expanding to include stories of violent and missing children in history and literature and tense scenes with a creepy professor in the woods near Lake Superior. Unfortunately, the forward motion is continually dragged down by Sylvia's guilt, self-doubt, and yearning for her estranged husband. "As the floor bucked beneath my feet and the mounted moose curled its dead lips into a snarl and a familiar silhouette glittered darkly, bewitchingly, just beyond the bounds of my vision, I asked myself for the hundred-millionth time why I failed so utterly to keep her safe." As maddening as it may be to her, this perseveration becomes a problem for the reader, too. Fans of novelized true crime and horror will love the premise but wish for less rumination.
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