Wake the Bones

Starred review from June 6, 2022
Nineteen-year-old white-cued Laurel Early battles supernatural forces on her family’s tobacco farm in Kilcoyne’s visceral horror debut. Laurel’s late mother Anna, who was a pariah in their rural Kentucky town, used her magic to grow healthy crops. The magic Laurel inherited, she believes, is less practical: when she touches a deceased animal’s body, she sees its death. After dropping out of college in Ohio, she returns home to help her uncle Jay run the farm alongside best friends Isaac, Ricky, and Garrett, all coded white. Increasingly strange and terrifying events—animals found brutally killed but uneaten, a giant monster made of bone, and Anna’s ghost issuing warnings—prompt Laurel to consult local outcast Christine, who reluctantly helps Laurel harness her magic. Laurel and Ricky’s combative romance and Isaac and Garrett’s tentative courtship are expertly developed, and their complex relationships with the “mean-mouthed and close-minded” townsfolk, the land itself, and each other are realistically thorny. Using an ominous third-person perspective, grisly horror elements, and distinct setting, Kilcoyne delivers an exceptional examination of life, death, and grief teeming with beauty and menace. Ages 13–up. Agent: Erin Clyburn, Jennifer De Chiara Literary.

July 1, 2022

Gr 10 Up-Back home in her small town after a failed year of college, Laurel Early seems to be falling back into farm life with her best friend Isaac and the Mobley boys, Garrett and Ricky. Additionally, her new side hobby of creating bone jewelry is connecting her to the nature of the forest and keeps her mind occupied. But when her family's past comes back to haunt her, Laurel must face a gruesome creature to protect those she holds most dear. Magic is at play, and the creature demands blood-the question Laurel has yet to figure out is whose. Kilcoyne's debut takes a small-town setting and twists it into a dark supernatural landscape stalked by an unnatural beast. Lush descriptions of the environment are covered with intricate details of decay and horror, building a tense world for the characters. The macabre monster targeting Laurel is not only a physical terror, but a great illustration of multiple characters' familial grief as a devil parasite that's relentlessly consuming life and weighing them down. Influenced by past darkness, Laurel and Isaac's evolving relationships with each of the Mobley boys brings light to their dim outlooks, reshaping their view on how wide and open the world truly is. All characters are described as white. Sensitivity content warning is included at the beginning for abuse, violence, suicide, and more. VERDICT A southern gothic horror sure to thrill, and thoroughly creep out, readers.-Emily Walker

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Starred review from May 1, 2022
Nineteen-year-old Laurel and her friends grapple with a curse on their town in this Southern gothic debut. In the small farming town of Dry Valley, Kentucky, Laurel faces her family legacy. Her mother had strange gifts before her mysterious death in their old well, leaving Laurel to grow up orphaned (and with a less useful gift: As a taxidermist, Laurel can read death stories from bones). When she and her best friends-turned-farm co-workers discover a grisly scene by the reopened well, it's only the beginning of the seemingly impossible--and increasingly dangerous--happenings. While confronting the past, Laurel and her friends, all distinctly drawn, also look to the future and who they want to be--for Laurel and Ricky, it's a charmingly bristling courtship dance. For Laurel's best friend, Isaac, and Ricky's brother, Garrett, it's more complicated. Garrett, happily a country boy, loves Isaac, but Isaac can't let himself love Garrett back as, to survive and escape Dry Valley (and an abusive situation), he knows he must leave. The characters, who default to White, are easy to get invested in as personal stakes climb so high that survival isn't a given. Told in the third-person, the novel's poetic language is atmospheric and evocative. Grounding depictions of the natural world are as vivid and lush as the descriptions of haunting horrors that are beautiful in their gruesomeness. These passages never slow the plot and frequently enhance the tension and suspense. In Kilcoyne, YA horror has found a new standard-bearer. (Horror. 13-18)

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