Knock Knock, Open Wide

Starred review from July 31, 2023
Transporting readers to a blood-soaked Ireland, Sharpson (When the Sparrow Falls) delivers modern horror at its best. One stormy night in 1979, Etain comes across a faceless corpse on the road; days later, she’s found half dead near a burnt-out farmhouse, her shattered mind a blank. Then, one of her twin daughters disappears in 1989, and soon after, her husband is found dead in a suspected suicide. By 2003, the only person still looking for an explanation to this mysterious series of events is Etain’s surviving daughter, Ashling, a university drama student who’s just entering into a passionate love affair with a woman. Ashling’s convinced, however, that what she remembers of her sister’s disappearance can’t possibly be true: it involved a popular children’s TV show about a goat puppet that would only come out of his box if someone had been very bad. According to everyone else who watched the show, the box never actually opened—but Ashling remembers it differently, and the more she investigates, the more she comes to fear that what’s inside is no cuddly puppet, but something old, crafty, and hungry. Sharpson does a masterful job of weaving together the three timelines, handling each story with tremendous sensitivity and skill while supplying genuine scares. By turns tender and terrifying, sexy and stomach-turning, heartwarming and heartrending, this folklore-steeped exploration of generational trauma is a high-water mark for the Irish horror novel.

July 28, 2023
A newly engaged Irish woman named Etain Larkin is 20 years old when she goes missing temporarily. Later, her eight-year-old daughter, Niamh, disappears; only Niamh never returns. Ashling, Niamh's twin sister, grows up with the shadow of her lost sister and drunken mother dragging on her back, and she is determined to find out what happened. Ashling believes the key to finding the truth about her broken family is a children's television show about a puppet, hiding in a box, that will come out if the children watching behave badly. Reading Sharpson's latest (after When the Sparrow Falls, 2021) is like being grabbed unexpectedly. Readers know something feels terribly wrong but cannot get away from the horror and mystery of the story; it simply demands that they understand the truth and reach its conclusion. Irish folklore provides the foundation for this intriguing, otherworldly book about the doors we keep closed, the doors we cannot help but open, the things we cannot kill, and whether the truth is worth knowing in the end.

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