I had a blast a year ago with 'The Sun Down Motel', the Simone St. James novel that made it into the Books of Horror Go To List that I'm now most of the way through, and I was eager to read this new book which is set in the same town of Fell, New York. It's an entirely standalone novel with no substantial crossover, though there are minor aspects that appear in both books. Characters here drive past that motel and one may even stay in it, not that we spend any time there this time out. Violet visits the local classics university, at which Heather was a student in that book. Also, Cathy Caldwell, who was a murder victim there shows up here as a ghost. That's about it. You don't need to read one to enjoy the other.

The lead characters are a set of three siblings: Violet, Vail and Dodie. They grew up together with their younger brother Ben, who vanished during a game of hide and seek when he was six and was never found. That loss has traumatised all three of them and they've all drifted away to new lives in new places, their childhood home still theirs collectively but intentionally left empty after their parents died. Those parents were rich but stingy and notably uncaring, both about them and each other. It wasn't a good childhood for any of them.

Fast forward to 1989 and none of them have been back to Fell in eighteen years. Violet works as a cleaner of dead people's houses. She's divorced from Clay, who has custody of their fourteen year old daughter, Lisette, on grounds of her mental instability. Well, she can see ghosts and spent an awful long time tormented by one in Fell that she knew as Sister. Vail lives in a cabin in Montana and works as an investigator of UFO sightings and abductions. Dodie works as a model in New York City, where she only does first dates, one of whom we meet, Ethan by name. It seems fair to say that they're all dealing with their past in happy isolation, but the one thing that gets them back to Fell is Ben.

It seems that the landscapers who maintain the grounds of their house in Fell saw him. He's still a six year old boy and he wants them to come home. That freaked them out enough to quit, but the message is passed along and so Violet, Vail and Dodie return to figure out what happened to Ben. It's a great setup, but St. James throws us a serious curveball soon after they get back to Fell. No photos of him apparently exist, not that there are any of the other kids either; Dodie once stole a family photo at a party just so she could pretend she belonged to one. However, Ben was never in school, the neighbours never saw him and there were no hospital records either. What's more, as they think back, none of his siblings can ever recall their mum being pregnant with him.

I had one particular theory in mind pretty early on, that turned out to be relatively close to what we're eventually let in on, but this curveball suddenly opens up a hundred others and our siblings have to start running them all down, with the help of people from their past, most obviously one retired cop, former detective Gus Pine, and his son Bradley, who Violet had a crush on back when they were in school together. He's quite a character here, mostly not for the good, but it's wild to compare him with Ethan, who's utterly different in almost every way.

I really can't talk a lot about where this goes, even though the key to the mystery arrives late in the book, almost out of the blue, but to each of the siblings in a different fashion. After keeping us in the dark for so long, it's as if St. James felt the need to unburden herself and so threw us a bone three times to ensure we couldn't miss it. That said, there are still twists to come after that and, as annoying as it is, I completely failed to foresee the primary one. It's a very good twist but I'm still kicking myself for not seeing it coming.

I liked 'The Sun Down Motel', a cosy horror with murders and ghosts and secrets. It alternated in sequence between two different timeframes, which gradually came together to become one and the same. Here, the alternation is between points of view, with each chapter initially toggling in turn between Violet, Vail and Dodie. That continues without staying quite that strict, so one may get two chapters in a row and another might combine them all. They're all excellent characters, shaped by their experiences as kids, which they haven't necessarily yet shared with each other.

Violet's a character who has been broken but is doing her level best to put herself back together and, for the most part, doing a reasonably good job at it, though there's still a lot of work needed to build a relationship with her daughter. Dodie is transitory, avoiding commitment and living her life in moments. She doesn't want to be a famous model, so specialises in hair, meaning that her face isn't always visible. And, of course, she has no second dates. Vail is the most tragic character of the three, because what he experienced as a child shaped his adult life, only to find in Fell that he's misinterpreted everything all along. He has to completely reset.

'A Box Full of Darkness' mostly succeeds in its characterisations, though I must also mention that it's wrapped up particularly nicely all around with an admirable amount of patience. The story is good too, though it ends up fundamentally simple when we get past all the many complexities to see it as it is. And, of course, there's the setting, because Fell is a gift that keeps on giving. I have no idea if there are other Simone St. James novels set there because I've only read two, but I can easily imagine it being a single town substituting for Stephen King's Maine as a hotbed of horror and weirdness.

He's the dedicatee here, but the character that I wonder about the most is Robert R. McCannon. No, not McCammon, but it's close enough that it surely has to be a nod, or maybe a dig. He's not particularly important, as a long-dead, long-forgotten city councillor who published a musty old memoir that helps one of the siblings to figure out the mystery. Surely there's a story there I'm thinking might come out at a convention. In the meantime, I have more Simone St. James novels to track down. I think I prefer 'The Sun Down Motel' but this is worthy too. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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