content warnings: pica (eating pages, flower petals and hair), violence, loss of a loved one, grief, discussions of hospitalisation, suicide and past child abuse, underage drinking, panic attacks
representation: protagonist, main and side characters with pica, Black main characters

“And Jane had felt alone. Really alone. And with the realization that you could never go back. Time marched forward. The figurine couldn’t be unbroken.
And now, in the hallway, that same bitter truth.
Jane couldn’t un-slam the locker door. They couldn’t un-move to this terrible town. Greer couldn’t un-die. ”

If there's one thing I can rely on, it's that reading a Katrina Leno book will make me hate how hot my country is and wish I was reading it by a fire in a nice sweater while the wind gently howls outside. But I digress.

Horrid is Katrina Leno's latest book and follows Jane, a teenage girl who's father has recently died of a heart attack. He had hidden how dire the family's financial situation was from her mother, Ruthellen, forcing Jane and Ruth to move from California to Ruth's hometown Bells Hollow in Maine. They move into Ruth's childhood home North Manor which has stood empty for two years ever since Ruth's mother died – or has it? The more time Jane spends in the house, the more certain she is that something strange and spooky is going on.

This is a book that's perfect for the spooky season, so of course I read it in mid-November when the weather is becoming disgustingly hot. It's atmospheric and chilly, full of lengthy descriptions about the creepy and draughty North Manor. We start the book on the road to Maine, so we never get to see the sunny California that Jane longs for. While Jane can dream of one day returning to the place she grew up, we have no such escape from this cold, oppressive town and home; we just have to survive alongside Jane with no reprieve.

Everything about this book feels oppressive in absolutely the best way. Even when Jane walks through abandoned streets and long hallways, it feels like the walls are closing in on both her and us. Katrina Leno is the master of transporting you to wherever her book is set and makes you experience every emotion her protagonist's do in the most painful way possible. That's especially effective with this book, which is all about Jane's anger and grief and confusion, and how these emotions physically manifest themselves.

I can't speak to whether Jane's pica is well represented or not, but as a metaphor it's masterful. Not just in the way it helps her deal with her anger, which seems to be forever present even when she's at her happiest, but the way it's also used to represent generational trauma and mental illness. From the first moment Jane steps foot in town it seems like everyone isn't telling her something about the house she now lives in, the house that has been nicknamed creep house, and for good reason.

There's a plot twist of sorts later in the book which I called pretty early, but I'm not someone who disregards a mystery or thriller just because I worked out the plot twist; in fact, I prefer it. It means that it's well-written enough to make sense to the average dummy, AKA me. Besides, I don't think the plot twist is meant to be shocking to the reader, or even to Jane. Because Jane's always known that something was wrong and she's just repressed everything.

Jane's habit of repressing things such as emotions and memories make her an incredibly unreliable narrator but not frustratingly so, mostly because she isn't aware that she's an unreliable narrator. She's also not the only one; everyone in the book is an unreliable narrator, because they're all telling their version of events. There are scenes towards the end of the book where the same story is told several times, all by different people, and everyone's version is just a little different, making it hard for both Jane and us to figure out who's telling the truth.

The ending is perfect. It's one that a lot of people won't like because while I would say it's very satisfying, it is ambiguous and abrupt, which happens to be my favourite way for this kind of spooky story to end. I won't be surprised if a lot of people give this 1 star just based on the ending, so go into it knowing that.

This book never had a chance of topping Summer of Salt, which is such a raw, deeply personal read for me, but it has jumped near the top of my favourite spooky reads list (which, admittedly, is a fairly small list). It has one of the best covers I've ever seen and the inside is just as good!