American Gothic: The May Queen Murders by Sarah Jude

Now, Ivy girl, you gotta know there's bad out in them woods, and the worst kind of bad Rowan's Glen has ever known is Birch Markle. Things weren't ever right with the Markle boy. There was no real reason for the things he done, but sometimes, well, evil's like that.

Like Brigadoon, the legendary Scots village that appears once a century, Rowan's Glen is a place out of sync with time, a late-nineteenth century-type settlement, set back in the Ozarks, with Scots-Irish folks with feet in two centuries. And that's the way Ivy Middleton likes it.

The kids at the consolidated high school roll their eyes and call them "The Cult," or "the hillbillies," or "the hippies," but Ivy loves the long ruffled skirts she and her best friend and cousin Heather make and the Glen's superstitions and spooky folktales her granny used to talk about, that is, before she stopped talking at all.  The Glen is a place where a death in the family means all the clocks in the house must be stopped, where the glimpse of a "shadow self" forewarns of death, and where little kids are warned to stay on the roads, out of the woods, and be home by twilight for fear of Birch Markle, Rowan Glen's own bogeyman who seems to choose one girl in each generation for his own blood sacrifice.

But this spring Heather is different. Ivy is used to their sharing all their secrets, but suddenly Heather has a secret she says she can't share, one that has her slipping out at night, and meeting with someone in the old stable by lanternlight. Ivy, too, realizes that her feelings are now different for her old playmate Rook Meriwether, whose touch is now "like a dandelion scattering inside her, seeds full of possibility." And now Rowan's Glen's leaders have decided it's time to revive the old May Day celebration and crown a May Queen, even though the old ones whisper that two girls, twenty years apart, were found brutally murdered on the day they were were chosen Queen of the May.

"He comes for girls with secrets," Aunt Rue tells Ivey, "you know, Terra McAvoy and my girl. And you. Nothing can stop him."

As the day approaches, favorite dogs go missing and are found mutilated in the woods. And when Heather is chosen to be the new May Queen. Ivy feels that she must protect her friend, her cousin, by following her on her night wanderings, despite the reports that Birch Markle is again heard screaming in the woods, the stench of death about the wild skins he wears. Rook and some of his friends agree to help Ivy protect Heather, but soon Ivy discovers her cousin drowned in the pond in the woods. And then they stumble upon what a cache of old dry bones, a bullet through the skull, crammed in the hollow of a tree.

Whose bones are they? And who is stalking the young girls of Rowan's Glen? And why?

Sarah Jude's forthcoming The May Queen Murders (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is pure American Gothic, filled with rich symbolism of Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Life and Death. Ivey's granny's self-imposed silence is like the community refusal to speak about the monstrous power among them, and Rook's quiet battle against the alien, poisonous belladonna shrubs that he doggedly roots out each spring.

Readers who like an atmospheric tale will find this one an engrossing read. Jude builds an eerie ambiance which hangs over Rowan's Glen like the spring fog as the story moves inexorably to its hair-raising conclusion, one whose terror is tempered by the almost other-worldly setting and the characters who insist, in true terror-tale typecasting, to go, against all warnings, down that twilight road, into that abandoned stable, or through those mist-shrouded woods to what awaits beyond.

With a Little Help from My Friends: This Raging Light by Estelle Laure

Mom was supposed to come home yesterday after her two-week vacation. Fourteen days. Said she needed a break from everything (See also: Us) and that she would be back before the first day of school. I waited up all night, hoping, hoping I was just being paranoid, that my pretty-much-never-wrong gut had made some kind of horrible mistake, and I watched the sun rise against the wall, my all-the-way-insides knowing the truth: we are alone, Wrenny and me.

I will do whatever I have to. No one will ever pull us apart. This means keeping things as normal as possible. Faking it.

Normal got gone with Dad.

And Lucille is good at faking it. Her father was taken away in the middle of a mental breakdown after trying to choke her mother and is at a halfway house somewhere. And with her mother's disappearance, it all falls to seventeen-year-old Lucille, determined somehow to keep her little sister with her, to keep their secret from the neighbors and their teachers, to find a way to pay the rent and utilities, to feed themselves, and to hold out until her mom returns or she turns eighteen and can become Wren's legal guardian, whichever comes first.

The month's bills are already coming in, and Lucille lucks into a part-time waitressing job at a small Mexican-themed bar and grill. Fred the owner expects his "girls" to be flashily made up, in short shorts and high heels, but he is also protective of them, and with pay and tips, Lucille can just cover the most important bills. Her best friend Eden tries to help, staying with Wren at night and trying to keep her own mother from finding out that Lucille and Wren are alone. To do so, she has to have help covering her absences and driving Lucille home at night from her twin brother Digby.

Lucille has known Eden and Digby since they were nine years old, and Digby has a committed relationship with his girlfriend Elaine. But as they are brought together by her secret, Lucille begins to recognize that she has strong and undeniable feelings for Digby, and when he begins to show that he also has an attraction to her, Lucille doesn't know what to do.

His hand is still resting on my foot. I am a giant foot, his hand a magical giant hand, and it is all over me. Breath. Less.

"What are you doing?" Who is this boy I've known for most of always, and why is he everything?

Then Eden gets in trouble with her mom for skipping her evening ballet classes, and Digby takes over staying with Wren, and he and Lucille draw closer. Eden discovers the feelings between her brother and Lucille, and she and Lucille quarrel. Elaine discovers that Digby is spending too much time with Lucille, and their teachers are asking questions she cannot quite answer.

As we say, it's complicated, and the complications of her life threaten to swamp Lucille completely as she feels more and more alone, in Estelle Laure's This Raging Light (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015),  In an absorbing and lyrical narrative, Laure captures the picture of  a strong-minded but nearly overwhelmed girl on the cusp of maturity, trying to carry adult responsibilities on her own shoulders. The portrayal of Lucille, Eden, and Digby, three well-intentioned young people caught in the complexities of life, shows them struggling to do the right thing in a situation they cannot fully control. Young adult readers will find much they recognize and much to like in these well-drawn characters, and the author even fleshes out the peripheral adults honestly and with respect for their own moral conflicts within this situation. This is a well-written novel, marred a little by the rather rushed and melodramatic "happy ending," but all in all, well worth the time of thoughtful readers.