Ghost Mother

August 23, 2024

More than anything in the world, Lilly Bly wants to be a mother. Sensing that the grand, yet dilapidated mansion located in the small Wisconsin town that she and her husband are relocating to will somehow lead to future motherhood, she convinces him to purchase it, despite their ever-increasing debts. However, Lilly begins to experience strange and disconcerting phenomena in the house, leading her to discover the mansion's grim past as the site of a triple murder-suicide 50 years ago. Her hunt for the truth about her home's terrible history becomes an obsession that, along with past traumas and her extreme desperation for a family, threatens to consume her entirely. In this fast-paced novel, Dwyer delivers evocative gothic horror brimming with heartbreak, loss, longing, and familial trauma. Readers will race towards the novel's shocking conclusion, which will leave them rethinking what is real or delusion and what it means to be truly haunted. VERDICT Dwyer's (Tracks of Angels) atmospheric, multilayered ghost story explores the ways strong desires can manifest. It is a must-read for fans of "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.--Jennifer Embree

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 2, 2024
A woman comes to believe she’s encountering the spirits of a murdered family in Dwyer’s middling gothic debut. After abandoning a dead-end acting career, Lilly Bly has turned her ambitions to becoming a mother. When her husband, Jack, takes a job in the small town of Haven, Wis., Lilly becomes enamored with a dilapidated local mansion once owned by a famous circus family. She views the place as an ideal home for her and Jack’s future children. Though it’s well out of their price range—and Lilly has endured multiple miscarriages, with only grim news on the fertility front—the Blys buy the house, then learn it was the site of a grisly murder-suicide in 1955. As Jack grows distant and starts taking on more out-of-town work, Lilly becomes obsessed with the crime. Her grip on reality loosens as she starts to hear murmuring voices and mysterious knocks in the house, then imagines herself interacting with the late family in the days before their deaths. Soon, the lines between reality and fantasy blur, and Lilly becomes protective of the ghost of the dead family’s daughter, propelling the plot toward a shocking tragedy. Dwyer conjures a sufficiently creaky haunted-house atmosphere, but her narrative lacks tension, and readers are likely to tire of being inside Lilly’s head well before the climax. This disappoints.