“I find those the more horrifying questions. “The things that really frighten me are more existential things, the things that go to the heart of and threaten or question human nature,” Ward explains. Ward’s fiction is notable for its dark and often uncomfortable psychological themes, though her stories include very few of the tropes and tricks most frequently associated with the horror genre and generally delight in turning expectations about what these stories should do and be on their heads.

But I think that’s the only reason I can write it-because if I’m not afraid I don’t really know how you’d expect the reader to be afraid.” “I cannot watch horror films and I find horror really difficult to read. “I am a complete scaredy-cat,” Ward admits with a laugh. But the author herself isn’t much a fan of the genre as a consumer.

In a genre that can often seem full to bursting with blood and gore, detailed descriptions of violent deaths, and literal monsters lurking in dark corners, her books have a distinctly more psychological bent, telling stories that are frequently as heartbreaking as they are disturbing. (Mar.Catriona Ward is not your typical horror author. This is a must-read for fans of gothic literature and taut psychological thrillers.

The queasy narrative gives its characters plenty of space to explore their unreal circumstances without ever sacrificing momentum, and while the ending skillfully ties together the many threads, it never offers easy answers. Ward’s brilliance lies in how she explicates the innate bizarreness of a child’s experience of the world and explores the small cruelties that families are uniquely capable of visiting upon one another through intimacies accumulated and treated as ammunition. But when her haunted, volatile daughter, Callie, shows signs that she might be heir to the horrors that Rob has spent so long trying to escape, Rob and Callie must venture back into the Mojave to exorcise the ghosts of Rob’s past before they destroy her family’s future. Rob has spent years distancing herself from Sundial, her enigmatic childhood home nestled deep in the Mojave Desert, finding comfort and normalcy in playing the role of dutiful wife and mother of two. With this masterful horror novel, Ward ( The Last House on Needless Street) weaves a seething, hallucinatory tale of family, death, and hereditary trauma that will keep readers guessing all the way to the devastating conclusion.

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