Miranda
Blackwood’s family is cursed and it’s not a secret
to anyone on Roanoke Island. Besides always being the one
to break something, or trip over her own feet, now she’s
seeing an eerie black ship that doesn’t need water to
sail through her town. The good old “Blackwood luck”
strikes again.
Phillips Rawling’s family is also cursed, but it is
a secret that is more easily hidden. When 114 people disappear
from the modern Roanoke Island-the same number that were in
the Lost Colony of 1585- Sherriff Rawlings calls his son back
from boarding school hoping that Phillips can do “What
you do” to explain why they disappeared and why there
was a murder that same night.
This story struck me as a cross between the classic Invasion
of the Body Snatchers and Disney’s spooky flick,
The
Haunted Mansion. Both are pretty scary, with Snatchers
winding you up more and more until you want to scream, and
Mansion using comedy as a relief valve in the fight between
the evil spirits and hapless mortals. In it you will find
a very clever combination of real elements, speculation and
paranormal activities. For example the theater that Miranda
works for, The Lost Colony, is a real-world venue that has
been memorializing the loss of the first colony since the
1930’s. The author keeps the spookiness factor riding
just below the surface of my skin; it’s not frightening
down to my bones, but it is really, really creepy. Thinking
that there is somebody, something, behind you that nobody
can see, and then dogs start howling, brrrrr. Twice I had
to close my Kindle and walk away from the ghost ship. The
description was just that chilling, but I kept coming back
to see what happened next.
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