Reading in the Mountains

Fell, New York doesn’t let people leave. Not really.

Violet sees the dead. Vail walked away and never looked back. Dodie tries to forget. Three siblings, three different ways of surviving the same nightmare—the night their little brother vanished during a simple game of hide-and-seek. Eighteen years later, something calls them home. Ben is back. Or something is.

And whatever waited for them all those years ago… is still there.

Okay, I have to admit—I’m not a horror girl. But every now and then, I’ll let a ghost story slip in… and the only author I actually trust to do it right is Simone St. James.

What I didn’t expect? All three siblings basically being haunted in their own way. That part caught me off guard. I did like that Violet ends up working with the former detective from Ben’s case—even though, at some point, it starts to feel like Ben might not even be their brother at all. No one remembers their mother being pregnant, there are no hospital records, no documents, no photos. Nothing. Which is… insane.

For a second, I was fully convinced he was a ghost—but the siblings remember him so clearly, taking care of him, changing him, raising him like he was real. And that just makes everything even more unsettling.

Overall, the story is pretty intriguing. I’m always a sucker for that small-town mystery vibe, so that part really worked for me—even if horror isn’t usually my thing. It’s a nice, easy read, more of a Halloween mood book… though I kind of loved reading it in spring.

Anyway, I gave it 3 stars. It didn’t fully convince me, but it was solid.