Christina Henry is a prolific writer, having produced well received and bestselling novels with dark themes across novels of horror, urban fantasy, and twisted fairy tales. Since her debut novel in 2010, she’s published 16 novels and multiple short stories. The Ghost Tree came to my attention thanks to a few social media accounts I’ve recently begun to follow (Mother Horror/Saide Hartmann and The Ladies of Horror Fiction) turned me on to this a story of two dead girls and what seems to be an annual thing in the small town of Smith’s Hollow, Ill set in 1985.
When people go missing in the sleepy town of Smith’s Hollow, the only clue to their fate comes when a teenager starts having terrifying visions, in a chilling horror novel from national bestselling author Christina Henry.
When the bodies of two girls are found torn apart in the town of Smiths Hollow, Lauren is surprised, but she also expects that the police won’t find the killer. After all, the year before her father’s body was found with his heart missing, and since then everyone has moved on. Even her best friend, Miranda, has become more interested in boys than in spending time at the old ghost tree, the way they used to when they were kids.
So when Lauren has a vision of a monster dragging the remains of the girls through the woods, she knows she can’t just do nothing. Not like the rest of her town. But as she draws closer to answers, she realizes that the foundation of her seemingly normal town might be rotten at the center. And that if nobody else stands for the missing, she will.
Our entry into this story is through the friendship, what remains of it at least, of Lauren and Miranda. Lauren isn’t maturing at quite the same pace as Miranda, who is becoming drawn to boys, particularly older boys. Lauren’s story is a bit unsettling, her father was murdered about a year prior to the start of the story and even more unsettling is that two girls are found mutilated in the backyard of an older widow. Miranda barely acknowledges the horrible crime, instead continuing to distance herself from her one-time best friend. Lauren, being a teenage girl, is constantly at odds with her mother who is stretched thin trying to pay the bills, raise Lauren and her younger brother David, and keep food on the table. Her younger brother is probably Lauren’s only true sense of happiness in life. The divide between the former best friends felt very genuine and real. I recall drifting apart from friends throughout my teen years and the reasons were not singular, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
Henry’s other focal characters are the Lopez family who live across the street from Mrs. Schneider, the woman whose house the two mutilated girls were found. Alex is a police officer in town, recently transferred from Chicago and is truly the outsider to Smith’s Hollow. Mrs. Schneider is, to be blunt, a racist and overall crank, so she has little affection for the Lopez family. Alex also sees things about Smith’s Hollow the town residents don’t as an outsider, strange connections and a series of murders that occur on an annual basis. As Alex uncovers more about the secrets of Smith’s Hollow, Lauren learns more about her connection to the strange goings-on including witchcraft and the haunted woods in which the titular Ghost Tree stands.
Henry does a great job with the pacing of the novel as she goes between the multiple threads of the novel. Alongside that strong element of the novel are the emotions of the characters and how strongly the come across the page. From the loneliness Lauren feels, to the awful feelings conveyed by Mrs. Schneider, to the anger the Lopez family feels, Henry makes each character unique.
The Ghost Tree plays on some popular tropes in the horror genre, a 1980s setting, a small town with secret, haunted woods/tree, a hidden lineage and plays with them extremely well. One of my favorite horror novels over the past decade and a half is Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge and I found some really nice resonance between the two novels – small, isolated town with a dark secret being the most prominent.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Ghost Tree and now have another author’s backlist to mine for dark reads.
Recommended as a terrific Hallowe’en (or anytime) read.
© 2021 Rob H. Bedford
Published by Berkeley Publishing | September 2020
Preview/excerpt: https://www.christinahenry.net/?p=1285
https://www.christinahenry.net/
Review copy purchased
