Kimmy loves her sisters. She loves their treehouse, the way it creaks when the wind speaks, the way the shadows dance just outside the windows. But something is wrong now. Her sisters are disappearing, the forest is stirring, and the voice behind the door is calling her by name.
Generally, there’s a lot to like with this short novella. The central setup comes across rather nicely, solidly grounding the relationship between the sisters so that there’s just enough emotional attachment to them that there’s a desire not to see them deal with the horrifying scenario in front of them. The ominous nature of what’s going on, from their reluctance to deal with the younger sisters’ questions and the forced nature of having to go through with everything even though there’s nothing they want to go through with, means that there’s a burgeoning sense of dread early on. That comes across even more overtly around the midway point with a truly chilling and frenetic attack sequence that not only plays nicely on the emotional resonance that’s been built up before but also introduces an ominous threat that turns the story in a slightly different direction.
That’s where the book changes slightly from the tense and unnatural suspense tale it had been building nicely into a more overt cosmic horror experience when the true nature of the ominous force becomes involved. The addition of multi-dimensional character arcs, plenty of bizarre visuals, and a more frenetic sense of action amps up the terror rather convincingly, especially the series of encounters involving the sisters as manipulated beings of the supernatural entity tormenting and tempting her into joining forces with it. That does highlight the rushed nature of the story, where it’s not clear on the fates of characters and what the main goal of everything is all about since it leaves a lot of these factors rather unclear for the sake of making things far more ominous. At times, the sisters are somewhat hard to tell apart in the narration without much in the character traits or personalities, but this isn’t that big of a detriment overall.
3.5/5
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