The Haunting of Velkwood
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3.5 • 13 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel
Finalist for the 2025 Shirley Jackson Award
From Bram Stoker Award–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes an “emotionally devastating, character driven ghost story” (CrimeReads) about three childhood friends who miraculously survive the night everyone in their suburban hometown turned to ghosts—perfect for fans of Yellowjackets.
The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.
Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never settling anywhere or with anyone, feeling as trapped by her past as if she was still there in the small town she so desperately wanted to escape from. When a new researcher tracks her down and offers to pay her to come back to enter the vicinity, Talitha claims she’s just doing it for the money. Of all the crackpot theories over the years, no one has discovered what happened the night Talitha, her estranged, former best friend Brett, and Grace, escaped their homes twenty years ago. Will she finally get the answers she’s been looking for all these years, or is this just another dead end?
Award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste has created an “eerie and evocative” (Kirkus Reviews) suburban ghost story about a small town that trapped three young women who must confront the past if they’re going to have a future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The propulsive if underbaked latest from Bram Stoker Award winner Kiste (Reluctant Immortals) aims to shed light on the terrors lurking beneath everyday suburbia but falls short of the mark. Middle-aged Talitha Velkwood was, in the 1980s, one of three friends to escape their small neighborhood—now known as "The Velkwood Vicinity"—before, in "a cosmic anomaly," it inexplicably "went from a nothing neighborhood to a literal nothing... it wavers in between, there and not there, like some kind of ghoulish Brigadoon." Now paranormal researcher Jack convinces Talitha to go back, sure that only she is capable of crossing the border. What she finds there is a street full of ghosts ready to bring her back to the traumas of her youth. Kiste delivers some truly uncanny imagery in this strange suburban wasteland, but the eerie atmospherics often fail to take on larger meaning. One of the Velkwood neighbors, for example, is always shown conversing with a frog in varying states of decomposition, but, beyond its weirdness, the significance of this remains opaque. The plot is fast-paced but somewhat predictable, and the scares never pack a true punch. This is best suited for Kiste's die-hard fans.
