#gothictown

Here is what I read in the month of April!

1. Heartwood by Amity Gaige

2. Sorcery and Small Magics by Maiga Doocy

3. Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix

4. Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

5. Gothictown by Emily Carpenter 

6. Eat, Slay, Love by Julie Mae Cohen

7. Coram House by Bailey Seybolt

8. Deadstream by Mar Romasco-Moore

9. What Remains of Teague House by Stacy Johns

10. Jaws by Peter Benchley 

11. The Children of Red Peak by Craig DiLouie

Gothictown by Emily Carpenter

Gothictown by Emily Carpenter 

pub date - 3/25/25

The old saying ‘if something seems too good to be true, it probably is’ applies to the plot and the story itself (for me). 

I was expecting a horror filled Gothic mystery thriller, but this read more like a cozy, which I found disappointing. I loved the setting but I despised the main character; add in “too long” and “predictable” and this one didn’t work well for me.

Other readers may find more to appreciate here. 

Thank you to Kensington and NetGalley for the DRC

Free ARC provided by Kensington Publishing via NetGalley in exchange for a fair review. Publish date 25 March 2025.

I requested this book because I was intrigued by its Southern Gothic premise. In Gothictown, ex-restauranteur and stay at home mom Billie is lured into moving her family down to picturesque small town Juliana, Georgia after seeing an advertisement for houses selling for only one hundred dollars. However, as you might guess, the offer is inevitably too good to be true, and Billie is dragged into a dangerous tangle of Juliana's dark secrets stretching back centuries...

This book got off on the wrong foot with a spelling error on the very first page (mantel where they meant mantle), and I wasn't especially enamored of the casual, unpolished prose. My second impression was that Gothictown is very much a post-COVID book, set perhaps a year or two after 2020. I'm so-so on including the pandemic in novels, but I found its presence compelling here. The specter of lockdown in a small New York apartment with a husband and six-year-old is obviously the driving force behind Billie's eagerness to snatch at a clearly too good to be true offer.

The book's pacing is somewhat erratic—while Billie's husband Peter picks up on the obviously cursed house and seems to be on the verge of nervous breakdown relatively quickly, our POV Billie is remarkably oblivious to the atmosphere. Besides from a handful of nightmares, she's under the impression that Juliana is a sweet and charming town well into the halfway point, which slogs down the pace. That is, until the novel breaks unexpectedly into a thriller-like confrontation more suited to a hotshot crime TV show in the last quarter. In addition, the choice to include flashbacks to the actions of the town founders throughout time from very early on rather spoils the tension, since it's relatively clear to the reader what's actually going on, even if Billie doesn't know. These anticlimactic spoilers contributed to the overall impression that the book was reluctant to commit to the horror genre, clinging instead to the plausible deniability of litfic rationalizations.