Second paragraph of third chapter:

I haul my bag up the hill. I haven’t brought much. All I need are shorts and t-shirts, flip flops, sneakers. Swim shorts. Harper arrives next week. Nat’s coming to the cottage tonight. I wrote to him weeks ago via the Castine post office, the way he told me to, and let him know I was coming. I don’t have his address. When I passed through Castine earlier I found his reply waiting, just as he promised I would, written in careful, childlike cursive: OK. I’ll bring dinner.

I got this as part of Kelly Lonesome’s submission for the 2024 Hugo packet, in the Best Editor Long Form category. I’m not sure if having that category for the Hugos really makes a lot of sense, but I am very appreciative of the reading material that it generates.

At first I wasn’t even sure if this book was sfnal to be appropriate for the Hugo packet. It starts out as an intense account of a teenager’s encounter with a serial killer in a village on the coast of Maine, and then flips a little forward to his retelling the story at university. But as we see layer upon layer of narrative unpeeling, and the true nature of the events becomes clear, I realised that it definitely qualifies as fantasy horror. It’s a complex and overlapping story, but Ward keeps control of it and we always know where we are. An unexpected dark pleasure.

You can get Looking Glass Sound here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile (bought while I was reading this) is The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck.