Seven years after her mordant debut novel, Dietland, amassed critical acclaim and a cult following for its no-holds-barred skewering of the diet and beauty industries, Sarai Walker second novel is finally here. With The Cherry Robbers, Walker has concocted another slyly subversive feminist fable, this time in the form of a grief-laced gothic thriller that takes on weighty topics such as marriage, women’s health and generational trauma.

In 2017, Sylvia Wren is a world-renowned, notoriously private painter living in New Mexico. She’s rarely seen in public and turns down virtually all requests for interviews. However, in a moment of errant curiosity, Sylvia reads a letter from a journalist who plans to write an exposé detailing what she has uncovered: that Sylvia Wren is in fact Iris Chapel, the sole surviving heiress of the Chapel Firearms fortune, who disappeared 60 years ago.

Suddenly the secrets that Sylvia has spent decades running from catch up to her, and with nowhere left to hide, she attempts to exorcize the ghosts of her past by chronicling the family curse that claimed the lives of her five sisters, relegated her mother to an asylum and prompted Sylvia to abandon her life as Iris.

Exquisitely tense and satisfyingly spooky,The Cherry Robbers masterfully blends psychological and supernatural horror. In sensual yet spritely prose, Walker conducts a darkly erotic exploration of female desire, duty and destiny via an ensemble of nuanced female characters, each with distinct personalities and rich inner lives. Readers know the grisly fate that awaits the Chapel girls, but Walker still manages to maintain a high degree of suspense and intrigue that will keep readers frantically flipping pages.

For fans of Diane Setterfield and Shirley Jackson, as well as readers who relish multilayered, thought-provoking family sagas, The Cherry Robbers is not to be missed.

Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a story you simply won’t see coming. You might think you’ve figured out the pillars of its structure after a few chapters, or come to truly understand its protagonist after walking a few dozen pages with her, but to read this powerful, moving and terrifying novel is to enter into a constant state of change. The story envelops you slowly, like a cocoon, wrapping you in its ever-increasing depth and heart until you emerge, at the end, transformed.

Sorrowland follows Vern, a pregnant woman who flees to the woods in a desperate attempt to escape the religious compound that was once her home. She fights for survival, first as an expectant mother, then as a fierce parent and protector of twin children. But the compound, it turns out, isn’t willing to let her go so easily, and not just because of its cultlike grip. Something darker is at work in Vern’s life, something at the core of her existence that she’ll have to face if she’s ever going to have a future.

As Vern gradually awakens to the wider world and its wonders and terrors, Solomon charts her journey through prose that is both economical and fiercely emotional. What’s most striking is the way in which Solomon captures Vern’s creeping, often frightening realization that the world is altogether more complex and monstrous than she once thought. 

Full of horror, love and incisive observation, Sorrowland is so perfectly plotted that readers won’t be able to predict what’s to come any better than Vern can. It’s a truly powerful piece of storytelling.

In Peter Cameron’s latest novel, an American couple referred to only as “the man” and “the woman” check into the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel in an unspecified northern European country. This is no ski junket; they are finalizing a long-awaited adoption of a child they hope will mend the widening rift in their marriage.

So far, pretty normal, right? But not long after check-in, the man finds himself in the hotel bar, where he is befriended by an ex-circus performer of indeterminate age and treated to the local alcoholic delicacy, a lichen-derived schnapps “tasting faintly of bleach and watercress and spearmint and rice.” The town’s two main attractions appear to be the orphanage and an enigmatic healer who goes by the name of Brother Emmanuel.

The man and woman’s first appointment with the orphanage lands them—possibly by accident—in the healer’s den, which might or might not have been fortuitous, given the woman’s apparently untreatable cancer. This turn of events then cascades into a series of Waiting for Godot-esque moments in which anticipation is frequently met with frustration and further delay.

As in Samuel Beckett’s famed play, we learn a great deal about the Americans as they await their next disappointment, chatting among themselves and with the Fellini-ish cast of supporting characters. Every time the reader begin to adjust to a new normal, Cameron slips in something to unsettle it all, such as the hotel’s doors (one of which the man kicked in after losing his room key) being UNESCO-certified artifacts salvaged from a Cairo opera house. That’s the kind of revelation that will make minibar charges seem trivial.

Perhaps What Happens at Night might have been more aptly titled When Serling Met Sartre. It’s a weirdly compelling mix of all the elements that make us human and all the situations that test our humanity.

Maybe these characters should have read a Yelp review before they booked this reservation. It’s likely that the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel doesn’t get many repeat customers.

Thirty-year-old Hetty Cartwright has always assumed the role of outcast, even in her own mind. She finds solace among the taxidermic specimens of the natural history museum, and she takes her assignment to oversee their care as they are removed from London during World War II very seriously. Jobs like this are almost never available to women, and Hetty is determined to prove her worth. But upon arriving at Lockwood, the manor home where the specimens are to be kept safe, Hetty immediately encounters setbacks. The first is the dangerous Major Lockwood, whose domineering attitude is offset by that of his meek, charming daughter, Lucy.

Lockwood Manor, with its empty rooms, unending chores and possible ghosts, functions as a central character. Lucy’s mother, the late Heloise Lockwood, suffered immensely in the house, always concerned about being followed by a woman in white—a ghost, a demon or perhaps something conjured by her own mind. The dead woman is shrouded in mystery, from her questionable parenting choices to her untimely demise. 

When the museum specimens begin to disappear and move about the house, Hetty doesn’t know what to do or think. Are the animals moving of their own accord, or is foul play involved? How can she best protect them while keeping the peace at Lockwood and ensuring her future employment with the museum?

Comparisons between Jane Healey’s debut and Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent are accurate, as The Animals at Lockwood Manor fits beautifully into the category of gothic fiction. Healey juxtaposes a sweet same-sex love story against the bleak backdrop of World War II, although the novel avoids focusing too closely on the war itself. Instead, the romantic escalation drives the plot forward, though frequent dream sequences threaten to derail the momentum.

This is a strong debut, full of creepy cliffhangers, lovely descriptions and a believably inelegant heroine. 

Fiction that transports us back to another time can, at its best, make us feel at home in an era into which we’ve never set foot. Unless, of course, the author doesn’t want us to feel at home. In the realm of great fantasy fiction set in a past we think we know, it’s often to a storyteller’s advantage to lure us in with a false sense of familiarity, only to reveal something else entirely. 

With Things in Jars, Jess Kidd has woven a spellbinding alternate version of Victorian London that is both recognizable and like getting lost in some mist-shrouded parallel world only spoken of in myths. It is into this version of London, where tattooed ghosts lurk near their own gravestones and seven-foot-tall housekeepers spend their idle time reading potboiler fiction, that Kidd drops Bridie Devine, a private detective with such distinctive style and intense charisma that we fall in love with her immediately. 

Jess Kidd’s Victorian London is both recognizable and like getting lost in some mist-shrouded parallel world only spoken of in myths.

When we meet her, Bridie is coming off a tough, failed case, but she’s got a new one on the horizon. The secret child of a wealthy man is missing, and the child may be much more than just a lost little girl. Armed with her own wits and accompanied by an unlikely spectral assistant, Bridie sets out to learn the truth about the child and along the way finds some ties to a past she tried to leave behind. 

Equal parts historical thriller and fabulist phantasm, Things in Jars is instantly compelling, but what sets it apart is the prose. There’s a playful, lithe familiarity to it as Kidd dances across delightfully apt phrases like a master. Even as the novel sweeps you up in its narrative, it also sweeps you up in its sentence-by-sentence construction, making it both a whirlwind read and a novel you could happily get lost in for weeks, dissecting every paragraph. 

Things in Jars is the kind of lavish, elegant genre treat that makes you wish Kidd would churn out a new Bridie Devine mystery every three years until the end of time. 

Making a brand-new myth is a tricky thing. It takes a deft storytelling hand to weave folklore where none may have existed before, along with a keen eye for little details of horror and beauty that can convince a reader that the dark tale unfolding before them is as abiding as the legends that creep around their own homelands. In Melmoth, Sarah Perry brings us a gorgeously wrought tale that feels as timeless as its title character and as real as the monster you’re sure is sitting at the foot of your bed.

Helen Franklin, an Englishwoman working as a translator in Prague, has a relatively simple and quiet life, and while it’s not exciting, that’s exactly what she wants. Everything changes when her friend Karel reveals a letter passed on to him from an old friend—a letter claiming to reveal not only long-ago sins of history but also a mysterious figure called Melmoth, an eternal witness damned to wander the earth for all time and seek out those cursed by their own sins. Karel is troubled by the letter and the files that accompany it, and he seems consumed by it all . . . until he disappears. Left with nothing but confusion, Helen also becomes consumed by this ancient presence and what it means for her own sins.

The simple premise of a shadowy figure who stalks you and witnesses your sins, even if you’re not prepared to confront them, is the driving force of Melmoth, and Perry doesn’t waste a word of this lean, taut novel, effectively conveying an ever-encroaching sense of absolute dread. The story builds, unfolding layers of darkness without ever becoming garish or pretentious, until by the end you’re happily trapped in its eerie embrace.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Sarah Perry for Melmoth.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.