Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!
Psychological thrillers two weeks in a row. This one is a little different from As Night Falls last week. The Singing Bone by Beth Hahn is a retrospective by the main character to her involvement with a cult murder twenty years before. A fascinating look at a Manson family style scenario and the psychology behind it. Be prepared for mature themes and language.
Alice liked “Alice-Alice” better than “head” or “freak”—which is what kids at school called her. She pretended not to care. She’d stopped talking to them ages ago. And her grades were high; people thought of her as “smart”—or that’s what she heard from Molly and Trina. The smart one. Really? Alice didn’t think she was so smart.
Beth Hahn, The Singing Bone
A convicted killer’s imminent parole forces a woman to confront the nightmarish past she’s spent twenty years escaping.
I found you. That’s what Mr. Wyck told her: I found you.
1979: Seventeen-year-old Alice Pearson can’t wait to graduate from high school so she can escape the small town in upstate New York where she grew up. In the meantime, she and her friends avoid their dysfunctional families while getting high in the woods. There they meet the enigmatic Jack Wyck, who lives in the rambling old farmhouse across the reservoir. Enticed by his quasi-mystical philosophy and the promise of a constant party, Alice and her friends join Mr. Wyck’s small group of devoted followers. But their heady, freewheeling idyll takes an increasingly sinister turn, as Alice finds herself crossing moral and emotional boundaries that erode her hold on reality. When Mr. Wyck’s grand scheme goes wrong, culminating in a night of horrific violence, Alice is barely able to find her way back to sanity.
Twenty years later, Alice Wood has created a quiet life for herself as a professor of folklore, but an acclaimed filmmaker threatens to expose her past with a documentary about Jack Wyck’s crimes and the cult-like following he continues to attract from his prison cell. Wyck has never forgiven Alice for testifying against him, and as he plots to overturn his conviction and regain his freedom, she is forced to confront the truth about what happened to her in the farmhouse—and her complicity in the evil around her.
I love this kind of story….and I’ll be reading one like this later in the month (The Girls, by Emma Cline). Thanks for sharing, and here’s mine: “TWO IF BY SEA”
This one sounds nicely creepy. My teaser this week comes from Fan the Flames by Katie Ruggle – a romantic suspense title. Happy reading!