I can't believe how quickly I read this. I honestly expected three or four days of picking it up and putting it down when a bright distraction went by, but once I picked it up I'll be damned if anything other than an earthquake was going to interrupt. It's not as if it's a fast 'n' furious thriller. It's a slow, atmospheric tale of a strange year as seen from the point of view of a young boy in a small American town, which is practically a genre of its own. Every other Stephen King book, Ray Bradbury, Rober R McCammon's Boy's Life and the late great Graham Joyce's Tooth Fairy did one in England. What has to happen is that the young protagonist has to be in the cusp of leaving childhood behind and as the fog of innocence fades and the other fog of hormones rises to take its place, strange things emerge from the murk. Unreal, half-real, surreal. In The Shadow Year, it's a long white car driven by a man in a white coat. It's people dying and disappearing. It's the model town in the basement and the eerie correspondences between the little figures moved by little sister Mary and the people in the real town above. It's a hundred other things, some strange, some banal, and the whole year exerts a strange fascination over the reader and draws them in as the town reveals its secrets but somehow every secret seems to make it more strange and mysterious, a thing constructed from faded dreams and memories. Wonderful prose paints the place and the people and then tilts them all slightly askew. Compulsively readable.