Violet
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
For many children, the summer of 1988 was filled with sunshine and laughter. But for ten-year-old Kris Barlow, it was her chance to say goodbye to her dying mother.
Three decades later, loss returns—her husband killed in a car accident. And so, Kris goes home to the place where she first knew pain—to that summer house overlooking the crystal waters of Lost Lake. It’s there that Kris and her eight-year-old daughter will make a stand against grief.
But a shadow has fallen over the quiet lake town of Pacington, Kansas. Beneath its surface, an evil has grown—and inside that home where Kris Barlow last saw her mother, an old friend awaits her return.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas's slow-burning second novel (after Kill Creek) is saturated with an atmosphere of loss, from the trauma endured by the protagonists to the decrepit house that lures them into its clutches. After Kris Barlow's husband is killed in a car accident, Kris takes her eight-year-old daughter, Sadie, to stay at her family's old summer house, where, decades earlier, Kris coped with the death of her mother. But instead of her idyllic memory, Kris finds a decaying house in a dying town plagued by loss and distrust. The longer they stay in the home, the more Sadie pulls away, drawn to the voices that lurk in the walls. Slowly, Kris realizes that the sorrow she endured there remained and festered, developing into a ruthless monster. Though the level of detail is ponderous including multiple pages spent on Kris brushing her teeth Thomas conjures the power of grief with dreadful clarity, rendering the entity's vengeance as inevitable as it is chilling. It's a gruesome, ghostly, yet moving tale of love, loss, and the endless power of memory.
