Black Sheep
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3.7 • 76 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Best Horror Book of the Year
A cynical twentysomething must confront her unconventional family’s dark secrets in this fiery, irreverent horror novel from the author of Such Sharp Teeth and Cackle.
Nobody has a “normal” family, but Vesper Wright’s is truly...something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back—mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious community she grew up in meant she couldn’t return. But then an envelope arrives on her doorstep.
Inside is an invitation to the wedding of Vesper’s beloved cousin Rosie. It’s to be hosted at the family farm. Have they made an exception to the rule? It wouldn’t be the first time Vesper’s been given special treatment. Is the invite a sweet gesture? An olive branch? A trap? Doesn’t matter. Something inside her insists she go to the wedding. Even if it means returning to the toxic environment she escaped. Even if it means reuniting with her mother, Constance, a former horror film star and forever ice queen.
When Vesper’s homecoming exhumes a terrifying secret, she’s forced to reckon with her family’s beliefs and her own crisis of faith in this deliciously sinister novel that explores the way family ties can bind us as we struggle to find our place in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrison (Such Sharp Teeth) has earned a reputation for writing stories about complicated women spiked with a hefty dose of the supernatural, and this deliciously spooky outing is no exception. Heroine Vesper is a waitress with a bad job and a worse attitude who lost all her friends and family when she left her insular religious community six years ago, looking for freedom and her absent father, who mysteriously disappeared from her life. She's sure she'll never be allowed to return—until she receives an unexpected wedding invitation: her close friend and cousin Rosie is marrying the boyfriend Vesper left behind. Half heartbroken and half desperate to see who bent the rules to invite her, Vesper goes home to a rapturous welcome from everyone except for her cold and distant mother. In fact, they're all almost too glad to see her, their smiles too wide, their conviction too firm: Vesper is home, they say, because the Lord wills it—and there is no escape from the will of their Dark Lord, Satan. Harrison finds new ways to press on the bruise of growing up as an outsider, delivering small-town religious horror with wit as sharp as a ritual dagger piercing through a bleeding core of familial trauma. This deserves to be front and center in any bookstore Halloween display.
