What Grows in the Dark by Jaq Evans is a horror novel coming out March 5th, 2024. As with all of my reviews, I mark spoilers with italics to make them easy to skip if you want. I got an ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review of the book.
Which, in short, is that it was amazing.
The book opens on youtuber duo Brigit, an emotionally unavailable but deeply charismatic scam psychic pretending to be guided by the ghost of her long-dead sister Emma, and Ian, a mostly-optimistic cameraman who came up with the idea for their youtube series. Together they travel the country (a transient lifestyle that particularly suits Brigit’s restlessness and emotional distance) pretending to help people who believe they are afflicted by ghosts or other problems for which one might decide they need a psychic. For a fee, of course.
Between gigs, Brigit gets a call from the small town she grew up in, the town she lived in when her older sister died. Alicia, an ex-girlfriend of Brigit’s sister, grown now and still living in town, wants Brigit’s psychic help solving the disappearance of two teens, and she’s prepared to pay Brigit and her cameraman much more than their standard rate if they’ll come, because the disappearances seem to be linked to Emma’s death all those years ago.
Because they don’t have anything else lined up, because Alicia is offering them a lot of money to make a simple trip, because their youtube channel is not exactly thriving and the pair’s dreams of network syndication have so far failed to come to fruition, and because Ian pushes for it a little as a chance to learn more about his perpetually-distant friend, Brigit agrees.
They arrive in Ellis Creek and Brigit finds herself in the center of a web of her own unhappy memories, deceptions such as Alicia revealing that she is actually the lead detective on the hunt for the missing kids, small town drama, and deeply unsettling experiences that Brigit can’t quite dismiss as mere hallucinations brought on by poor sleep and high stress. As Ian and Brigit investigate, meeting with more locals from Brigit’s past and making what connections they can, things in Ellis Creek only grow stranger, and more dangerous.
Aside from being an exciting, unnerving, and well-plotted book, aside from having characters who felt tangible and complex and real, I loved the writing in this book on a line level. Jaq Evans writes with a visceral clarity that several times had me copying out lines to go “Ooooh” about at my leisure.
Brigit was presented from the start as a complicated character, difficult to get close to, difficult to like. She closes herself off from people emotionally, pushes away at Ian’s attempts to deepen their friendship despite knowing him for some time and literally traveling the country with him, and makes her money by scamming people. Brigit also has an almost uncanny ability to read people, and a keen sense of and regret for her own shortcomings that does not feel performative but genuine. In the first chapter we are introduced to Brigit unequivocally faking a séance, but we also see her doing her best to offer any thread of legitimate help or support she thinks her young client needs. The whole comes together to create a complex woman who has experienced trauma at a young age and has reacted to it by closing herself off from the world—but who also does, on some level, want to help people. She’s not exactly likeable, but she’s understandable, and she’s easy to root for, too.
The POV switches between Brigit and Ian. At first I found Ian a slightly less compelling character than Brigit, but the more I read of him the more his own conflictions and complexities became clear. He’s a character of contradictions, first in the way he differs from Brigit; he wants to be close to Brigit, he wants to be likeable, he doesn’t have the almost uncanny ability to read people that Brigit has, he’s more optimistic. Both Brigit and Ian see themselves as more fundamentally flawed than they are—but it seems to me that Brigit feels more self-recrimination about this whereas Ian gives me the impression of having a little more distance from it, in part because the parts of Ian’s self that he doesn’t like all come back to his dad, a character who is never actively present in the book but who it is revealed first through implication and later through more concrete references to have been an abusive parent. And the narration sets up certain small expectations about Ian that it then turns around on the reader, for example when the two filmmakers have to get checked out at the hospital, Ian has no worry at all about the cost and considers paying for Brigit’s bills as well, only rejecting the idea because he knows she would not want that. From this, for a brief time, the reader might think that Ian comes from a place of privilege. It’s only over the course of the book that the narration reveals that Ian only has any money because of the death of his mother, and the cause of his mother’s death is one of the very few points in the book that I was not very clear on (and also, in the grand scheme of the book, not very vital to know, so in the end it didn’t bother me that I was not very clear on that piece of Ian’s history).
I loved the introduction to Ellis Creek coming from an Ian chapter. As a reader who has never been to this town in this world that Evans created, entering it the first time from the point of view of the character who did not grow up there, who was seeing it as an outsider, made that moment feel so vivid and real.
The scares in the book were uncanny and unsettling, from experiences that Brigit did not know whether to dismiss as hallucinations or fear as malicious visitations, to the fear of the unknown when the characters first delve into the woods at the heart of this story, to abrupt moments of shocking violence, and any time the entity in the woods interacted directly with the characters—whether from within in one of the most absorbing possession scenes I’ve ever read or face to face in the deep dark woods.
The following paragraph, in italics, is going to be spoiler-heavy. Skip to the next part if you wish to avoid spoilers.
I loved the possession scene in this book. Brigit’s frightening visions before and after going into the Dell are uncanny and eerie and unsettling, just top-tier spooky vibes for Halloween-time when I was starting this book. But the possession scene is one of the moments in this book that outshines all the scares leading up to it and really gives the reader something to feel viscerally horrified about. It’s done from the perspective of Ian, who has been possessed by a birch-sapling-monster after spending a night in the Dell. Reading his experience of the possession, feeling his body and hearing his words, doing and saying things outside of his control, the violation of it, and on a level he doesn’t want to acknowledge a thread of something that is nearly satisfaction—he doesn’t like or appreciate the way the creature is making him treat Brigit and the others, but it’s also saying a lot of things he has thought, wondered, or even wanted to say and decided better. And then, to realize that the act of possession he had endured was not even about him, that this violation of his body and voice and self was just in the service of hurting someone else, was such a profoundly upsetting moment.
Alright, spoilers done for now. Instead I’ll touch on how I enjoyed the queer representation in this novel (which I’ve just remembered does include one minor spoiler so watch for an italicized sentence if you want to skip it). There’s Alicia, who is introduced as a former girlfriend of the late Emma, and who still lives in Ellis Creek working as a detective and trying to help the people in the town. There’s Brigit herself, who, though she uses she/her pronouns for the sake of convenience, is nonbinary and briefly mentions that there’s pain in knowing that Emma will never know that her younger sister also sometimes dates women and that the queer identity is something they could have shared. And there’s Sam, a former classmate of Brigit’s and a friend of one of the missing teens, who is a trans man. One of my favorite things about this queer representation is that it is allowed to be messy. I can’t speak to whether or not Evans felt the pressure many LGBTQ+ authors feel, to write queer characters who are paragons of virtue in an effort to shield the community from prejudice. I can say that if Evans did feel this pressure, the book does an excellent job of moving past that restrictive paradigm and gives the reader queer characters who are complex, messy, with faults and with less virtuous sides, and who are all the more relatable for it, and who are still trying to do their best just like everybody, and who the reader still roots for.
One potential pitfall of any supernatural horror with monsters in it is the moment the monster is revealed. It’s a make-or-break moment, and there are so many ways to stumble over it. The movie Mama, for example, falls into a couple of those traps—the monster is revealed too soon, and the monster is not scary enough to carry the rest of the movie after that moment. What Grows in the Dark avoids that pitfall. There is a scene in the woods that involves all of the characters except Brigit, when something horrifying happens just behind Ian, and that was a delightfully creepy-crawly moment.
The other place that I feel horror can struggle is with endings (there was a reason a running joke in 2019’s It Chapter Two was that Bill Denbrough’s endings suck). If the evil is defeated too tidily it feels a little trite. If everyone dies, it feels too grim. Without giving any spoilers, I think that the ending of What Grows in the Dark walks the line between those potential issues in a way that is very compelling, and in a way that leaves the reader thinking not only about the complexity of fighting evil forces, but the complexity in moving on with one’s life after a traumatic event.
The plot threads all came together beautifully, the scares ranged from eerie and unsettling to crawling-skin upsetting, the pacing kept me turning pages, and the character writing was complex and nuanced and compelling. Overall, I’m happy to give What Grows in the Dark by Jaq Evans five stars.
This review has been an excerpt from my monthly newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. You can find the rest of this issue of the newsletter here, complete with a writing update and some every day horror inspiration, as well as my review of the recent (sensational) horror movie Talk to Me, and some pictures of my pets. If you like what you read, subscribe!