Midnight is the Darkest Hour
A Novel
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
From the critically acclaimed author of In My Dreams I Hold A Knife and The Last Housewife comes Midnight is the Darkest Hour, a gothic Southern thriller about a killer haunting a small Louisiana town, where two outcasts—the preacher's daughter and the boy from the wrong side of the tracks—hold the key to uncovering the truth.
For fans of Verity and A Flicker in the Dark, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is a twisted tale of murder, obsessive love, and the beastly urges that lie dormant within us all...even the God-fearing folk of Bottom Springs, Louisiana. In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners’ bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar—and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.
A dark and powerful novel like fans have come to expect from Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is an examination of the ways we’ve come to expect love, religion, and stories to save us, the lengths we have to go to in order to take back power, and the monstrous work of being a girl in this world.
“Where The Crawdads Sing meets Twilight meets Thelma and Louise in this brilliantly realized, totally original thriller. Absolutely sensational—I couldn’t put it down." —Clare Mackintosh, New York Times bestselling author
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winstead (The Last Housewife) serves up a sharp meditation on feminism and religious oppression in this atmospheric Louisiana-set thriller. Ruth Cornier, the independent-minded daughter of Pastor James Cornier, is the sole librarian in the small town of Bottom Springs, who takes particular pleasure in works of heretical fiction, including the Twilight novels. One afternoon, Ruth is devastated to learn that a human skull has been found in the swamp next to the library. When Ruth was 17, she was almost raped in the same swamp by itinerant worker Renard Michaels. Ruth's friend Everett, a local outcast, intervened, and Michaels was killed in the ensuing fight and his body left to sink into the swamp. When the remains are identified as those of another man, Ruth's worst fears are momentarily averted, but then a bigger problem emerges: might Bottom Springs have a killer on its hands? Alternating between past and present, Winstead movingly fleshes out Ruth and Everett's friendship without sacrificing pace or surprise as the body count rises. Evocative prose (the setting sun is described as "fighting death, reaching out with grasping fingers of orange and rose against the falling twilight") is a major plus. Fans of Michael Koryta's Southern gothic novels, including The Cypress House, will be enchanted.
