When Case arrives at her best friend Drea’s house in the West Texas woods, she finds her friend isn’t there to meet her, and not only do her housemates not know where she is, but they seem to know something they’re not saying… Taking place over 24 hours, Case finds hidden journal pages and strange clues in the house that make her think something sinister may have happened to Drea.

Samantha Mabry is the author of Tigers, Not Daughters and A Fierce And Subtle Poison. Clever Creatures Of The Night is YA Fiction. It has a great, mysterious premise which reminded me a bit of point and click adventure games, when I started reading, and it has wonderful cover art.

I didn’t like this one. It starts of well, with a great atmosphere. The skies are smokey and the cab driver has never heard of the road that the house is on. We are in the middle of nowhere, remote and wild. The house itself is awesome. It’s crumbling and seems to tilt. The front steps are broken, bricks are loose, the fencing is rusted, and the whole thing is covered in vines. Even though the outside is crumbling, inside, the people that Drea was living with are all bright and shiny, looking like they don’t sweat.

Into this space is woven two stories or two mysteries. There’s Case’s past and an event that has left her scarred, and then there is the present, what is happening in the house and the mystery of where Drea is. These two plots are set up well, but the book doesn’t really come together. I had a few issues. Firstly, the book foreshadows something that hints at either magic realism or a haunting, with one of the leads being compared to a local witch of legend. Nothing comes of this. Part way through the book, an apocalyptic event is mentioned, making it seem like this is all in a dystopian future, but everything outside the house seems fine, phones work as usual, stores are fully stocked, society has not broken down, which makes it feel like this was decided on later in the book and not really built into the story well. At first, Case has hand tremors, later the book tells us she has scars on her arms and later her face, and one shoulder sits lower than the other, due to injuries from a fire. It’s mentioned that one of the people in the house notices her hand tremors when they meet her, but not her scarred face. Oddly. (Side note, this also is odd. Most people who die in fires are killed by smoke inhalation long before the flames ever reach them, so her even having this extensive scarring is unlikely. It would make more sense if it happened in an accident, but I digress)

The key thing that struck me was how odd Case and her actions are. The book takes place over 24 hours. She has been invited by her friend to come and stay, but her friend isn’t there. In perspective, her friend has written to her often, but she has not replied once over the course of two years. She didn’t even know her friend’s mother had moved away. So, how are they best friends? The people who live in the house all say her friend never mentioned her. And since she never replied, it’s really not odd at all that her friend isn’t there to meet her. In fact, it’s more odd that Case IS there. She then is rude and abrupt to all of the housemates, not offering to help cook, to clean up after herself, she borrows a shirt in one scene, even though she has her own, and she leaves her dirty clothes on the floor. Drea’s housemates not wanting to help her really isn’t strange. Over the course of the book we learn that Case can get physically aggressive, there are about 3 times she hits someone in the face, and then afterwards justifies her actions to herself, showing no remorse. She’s angry at the police later for not immediately believing her story, but throughout the book I’m not sure I believe it. There’s no evidence of a crime, all she has is some diary entries and that a friend that she never spoke to isn’t there. In the end, I’m not convinced there was actually was a crime.

There’s not a lot of tension in this book and a lot of wandering around with not much happening. To me, it felt like the author had a haunted house mystery idea and a Bible Belt set, end of days apocalypse story, and just loosely sewed them together. There are themes of classism and America in it’s latter days, maybe a bit of racism thrown in as well, but these themes don’t feel fleshed out or explored. When I learned later into the story that Drea and Case are lantinx, the book felt like it was trying to copy Mexican Gothic.

I wanted to like this one. I may have liked it if it had stuck to either spooky house in the woods gothic, OR the apocalyptic story. Neither idea was well fleshed out and the mystery felt flat because in a few ways, there wasn’t enough reason to believe there was one. I got more annoyed as the book went on, until in the last chapters, I was wondering why a guy from the gas station was wondering around in a forest with Case, it was all just so melodramatic and unbelievable. There are so many inconsistencies, like in one chapter she’s having a bath and then later we learn there’s a water shortage. At the end, we’re meant to accept that Case is going to be OK because even though she lost Drea, who she never replied to anyway, she now is friends with gas station guy. All’s well that ends well. Who is the real bad guy in this story? What did I just read?

Read It If: try this one if you liked Mexican Gothic or books of that nature, but I don’t personally recommend this one.

Thank you to HBG Canada for the copy of this book for review.