Harrow Lake

WHAT I LOVED:
All three narrators of the audiobook are very good at what they do, but the primary narrator is particularly excellent. I’ve heard good and bad narrators alike and some are really bad at different voices. This one? She’s VERY good at them. She’s so good I’m giving the novel one star more than I would have had I read a print version because this is otherwise a mediocre horror novel.

After someone stabs her father, Lola is sent to stay with the maternal grandmother she’s never met and her striking resemblance to her mother puts everyone around her on edge. It really doesn’t help all her own clothes have disappeared and Lola is stuck wearing her absentee mother’s old wardrobe. Harrow Lake is a quirky little town that leans into the fame her father’s film Nightjar brought them, but there are a lot of things the locals don’t care about. Like the girls who go missing after being Nightjar’s heroine Little Bird in the town parade or the mystery girl who follows Lola everywhere.

Just to set your expectations right off the bat, there is nothing paranormal whatsoever in Harrow Lake and it’s good to make that clear ahead of time so you aren’t disappointed by the expectation of it. I know how it feels when you expect human horror and get paranormal or vice versa.

This is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves to make the horrors we experience more bearable, what abuse looks like, and all the ways someone can be a monster. I’m typically not one to harp on a novel’s themes like some English teacher the students are tuning out, but Harrow Lake explores the aforementioned from such interesting angles I’m still thinking about it.

WHAT LEFT ME WANTING:
However, the novel’s tendency to fall back on questioning Lola’s sanity weakens the approach to those themes. Me, I’m one to prefer my suspense/horror not rely on people like Lola, who is clearly mentally ill to so vividly hallucinate her childhood doll being alive and with her.

Think Get Out, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and Halloween. Those are my three favorite horror movies and the main characters’ sanity is never in question in any of them. Unreliable narrators are excellent and I love one pulled off well as seen in one of the above films, but Lola just can’t make the grade. It’s a sensitive topic for me because I am mentally ill, though I’ve had consistent treatment since 2014 and I’m not ill in any ways that make people doubt what I’ve experienced.

FINAL VERDICT:
Plenty of my opinion on Harrow Lake boils down to my personal tastes in horror, so you might feel differently if any of what I’ve criticized is something that you specifically look for when you need spooky things. I’d rather rewatch my three movies, maybe reread Amy Lukavics’ Daughters Unto Devils or Hillary Monahan’s The Hollow Girl even though both of those are paranormal horror.