Memorials

Starred review from September 2, 2024
Bestseller Chizmar (Gwendy’s Button Box, with Stephen King) wows in an immersive and über-creepy novel that pays subtle homage to horror classics ranging from the works of H.P. Lovecraft to The Blair Witch Project. In 1983, three students in an American Studies class at Pennsylvania’s York College—Billy Anderson, Troy Carpenter, and Melody Wise—plan to make a documentary about roadside memorials in Pennsylvania’s Appalachian region, an area where, as their professor warns, “if you look hard enough... you’ll find the impossible.” Chizmar gradually ratchets up a palpable feeling of unease through an accumulation of small unsettling moments. The classmates’ vehicle passes a biker who’s smiling through a face masked by blood. Troy begins to worry that someone is spying on them, a paranoia that’s heightened when video shot by Billy reveals a stranger lurking in the shadows. The discovery that a cryptic symbol has been drawn on several of the memorials to accident victims increases the group’s worries that they’ve stumbled into something dangerous—fears that prove all too justified. Chizmar pulls no punches on the way to a thoroughly satisfying finale, creating a literate horror novel that will remind some of T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies. It’s a tour de force.