... assured ... North has an eye for moments of skewed dailiness ... These visual details are so effective that the more explicit beats of foreboding feel extraneous. The set-piece scenes — that school fight, a visit to a suspect’s house — are beautifully paced and surprising. As in his debut, The Whisper Man, North is aware of how a good horror novel can subtly rearrange a reader’s surroundings, charging them with menace, and he nods to the tradition with references to The Monkey’s Paw and The Shining ... absorbing, headlong reading, a play on classic horror with an inventiveness of its own. In the third act, a revelation upends both the entire narrative and its emotional valence. Such a major double-cross is risky. Somehow, though, the twist comes across not as a metafictional, authorial intervention, but as the work of a character struggling to survive a grinding loss. As with all the best illusions, you are left feeling not tricked, but full of wonder.
I do not recommend reading this book at night, especially in the first two hundred or so pages, because it is frightfully atmospheric! I was genuinely afraid I would have nightmares after reading this impressively creepy novel of suspense. I was most struck, however, with how this twisty tale of ghostly terror incorporates both a tragic coming-of-age with a meditation on the parent-child relationship. From Paul’s realization of his mother’s vibrant past to the grief of parents over a lost child to Amanda’s own reconciliation of her career with her deceased policeman dad’s, The Shadows examines all the ways we cope with the loss of a loved family member ... I truly enjoyed reading this novel ... It’s not often that you find a solid murder mystery cleverly melded with supernatural horror. It’s rarer still to find those written with as much finesse and true emotional insight as in The Shadows.
The reader can expect to be electrified by the author’s total mastery of misdirection. This second stunning thriller firmly establishes North as a rapturous teller of tales.
The conclusion wraps it up too tidily, but overall, this is a successful, creepy thriller. If you like Stephen King, you’ll probably like North’s new thriller, too.
... another terrifying spine-tingler ... The complex plot shifts smoothly between past and present with numerous unexpected twists. An overwhelming atmosphere of doom and disaster hovers over the perennial darkness of the nearby woods. This heart-pounding page-turner is impossible to put down.
The complicated backstory and new characters introduced late in the game to explain the increasingly confusing facts are not great. But the recourse to the ol’ 'and then I woke up' tactic to pull one over on the reader is worse ... Despite several interesting characters, the suspense plot lacks an engaging emotional core.
