Something in the Walls

January 6, 2025
Demons and ghosts pale in comparison to human monsters in this rewarding folk thriller from Pearce (The Missing). Recent child psychology graduate Mina is still wracked with grief over the death of her brother more than six years ago. To cope, she starts attending a counseling group, where she meets Sam, a journalist mourning the death of his daughter. The pair bond quickly, and Sam soon asks Mina to help him interview 13-year-old Alice Webber, whose strange behavior has caused some members of her rural English community to believe she’s possessed. Mina leaps at the chance to utilize her degree while secretly hoping that Alice might be able to help contact her brother. As Alice’s outbursts grow more violent, her neighbors become increasingly paranoid, their mob mentality making Mina fear for Alice’s safety. While poking around with an increasingly depressed Sam, Mina learns that the villager who’s stirring up the loudest commotion about Alice’s possession might not be as benevolent as he seems. What begins as a supernatural thriller gradually develops into a thoughtful meditation on grief and groupthink, with enough pathos and drama to keep the pages turning. It’s a winner.

November 15, 2024

Pearce (The Missing) melds folklore, horror, and psychological suspense in her latest. When a teenage girl claims that she's possessed by a witch, child psychologist Mina ventures to a remote English village to try to help her, but the small town is full of superstition and sinister traditions. Prepub Alert.

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February 1, 2025
Mina should be happy. She's starting a new career as a child psychologist. She's getting married. But she suffered an unimaginable loss as a child that haunts her to this day. At a grief-therapy group, she meets Sam, a journalist exploring mysterious occurrences in a small Cornish town. Is Alice, a local teenager, acting possessed in a bid for fame and attention? Are she and her family faking the weird voices and dripping walls? Or is there really something haunting Alice? Something in the Walls is more creepy than scary, with a decidedly folk-horror bent and a claustrophobic, small-town setting with lots of secrets. Pearce provides visceral descriptions of people and places and smells and sounds to create a world where no one can trust their senses. Readers will be left questioning which is more disturbing, the rot within or the evil of other people. Recommended for readers looking for an introduction to folk horror, or fans of Slewfoot (2021), by Brom, Smothermoss (2024), by Alisa Alering, and The Unmothers (2024), by Leslie J. Anderson.

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March 1, 2025
A fledgling British psychologist tries to unravel a teen's mysterious affliction in a Cornwall community gripped by the occult. Six years after the death of her brother, Eddie, Mina Ellis is still haunted by memories that have been mercifully ameliorated by her attendance at a bereavement support group. There she meets empathetic journalist Sam Hunter, who hires her to do background research on a story he's covering for theWestern Herald. Though she's professionally inexperienced, Mina has recently gotten her degree in psychology. Since she's also feeling secretly uncertain about her upcoming marriage to the brusque Oscar, the assignment, which sends her to the bucolic parish of Banathel, provides a welcome getaway. The subject is Alice Webber, a bedridden teenager who believes she's possessed by a witch. Parents Lisa and Paul are warmly supportive, but siblings Tamsin and Billy are frustrated and skeptical. The womblike aura of the household makes Mina homesick. Her arrival disturbs the parish, which has a long history of sorcery-related tragedy (thinkThe Wicker Man), and a clutch of citizens visits the Webbers to demand that she leave. Shortly after Mina becomes convinced that Alice's malady is psychological, the arrival of Alice's nemesis, Vicky Matherson, triggers a horrific incident that shocks everyone. Pearce's first-person narrative compellingly captures Mina's mental fragility, the swirling anxiety simmering beneath even her most mundane human interactions and intensified by the heatwave that's gripping Britain, marked by brown grass that's a metaphor for her dark psyche. Can Mina trust her own analyses? A taut tale that chillingly intertwines psychological and supernatural suspense.

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