Memorials
A Novel
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller about a group of college students encountering supernatural terror while on a road trip through Appalachia—an unforgettable, chilling novel that is “scary and hard to put down. You might be advised not to read it at night” (Stephen King).
1983: Three students from a small college embark on a weeklong road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. The project starts out as a fun adventure, with long stretches of empty road and nightly campfires where they begin to open up with one another.
But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the atmosphere begins to darken. They notice more and more of the memorials feature a strange, unsettling symbol hinting at a sinister secret. Paranoia sets in when it appears they are being followed. Their vehicle is tampered with overnight, and some of the locals appear to be anything but welcoming. Before long, the students can’t help but wonder if these roadside deaths were really random accidents…or is something terrifying at work here?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you’re a sucker for small-town-with-a-dark-secret chillers, then this tale of a well-intentioned college project gone awry in 1983 rural Pennsylvania is for you. Billy, Troy, and Melody are well acquainted with the tragedy of losing close family members, so it’s not surprising that their final project in American Studies 301 is a documentary about Appalachian roadside memorials to car accidents, including interviews with the grieving relatives those victims left behind. But a series of unsettling encounters with the locals gradually points to a creepy connection among several of the accidents—including the death of Billy’s own parents in a car crash when he was 16. Author Richard Chizmar’s spooky story (speckled throughout with video transcripts that hark back to many found-footage film faves) breaks from the usual horror tropes with its genuine and thoughtful grappling with grief and the marks it leaves on a person as they struggle to recover. The author vividly depicts just how much Billy’s life derails after his parents’ deaths and how trying to move on is not a linear process; that realism casts the more fantastical aspects of the plot into sharp relief. This is terror with a brain and a heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Chizmar (Gwendy's Button Box, with Stephen King) wows in an immersive and über-creepy novel that pays subtle homage to horror classics ranging from the works of H.P. Lovecraft to The Blair Witch Project. In 1983, three students in an American Studies class at Pennsylvania's York College—Billy Anderson, Troy Carpenter, and Melody Wise—plan to make a documentary about roadside memorials in Pennsylvania's Appalachian region, an area where, as their professor warns, "if you look hard enough... you'll find the impossible." Chizmar gradually ratchets up a palpable feeling of unease through an accumulation of small unsettling moments. The classmates' vehicle passes a biker who's smiling through a face masked by blood. Troy begins to worry that someone is spying on them, a paranoia that's heightened when video shot by Billy reveals a stranger lurking in the shadows. The discovery that a cryptic symbol has been drawn on several of the memorials to accident victims increases the group's worries that they've stumbled into something dangerous—fears that prove all too justified. Chizmar pulls no punches on the way to a thoroughly satisfying finale, creating a literate horror novel that will remind some of T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies. It's a tour de force.
