Jesse returns to the small town he grew up in, Blacknot NC, when a mysterious text offers him more information about his mother’s death. 18 years ago, her body was found by the river, surrounded by mysterious ritual objects, and with baby Jesse wailing beside her. While the cause of death was nominally heart failure, there are plenty of stories about cults, witchcraft and the strange things that happen in the abandoned building called The Night House on the edge of town, and not everyone is happy about him poking around…

Red Rabbit Ghost is the debut novel from Jen Julian, whose previous book was a short story anthology. The book is, to me, definitely in the Southern Gothic oeuvre, with horror elements. This means its more about place and atmosphere than pure horror scares, though it does have a haunted house and supernatural things that happen as well. The book is written in the third person, and the narrative moves between two stories, alternating chapters, that of Jesse returning from college to follow the thread, and that of Alice, a troubled teenage girl who has recently returned from a stint in a mental health facility and lives with her wealthy father on the better side of town. We initially don’t know what links these two stories, but they come together as the story progresses and spiral around each other.

The story opens strongly with Jesse returning to the house where his aunt raised him and desperately looking for the tin he kept any mementoes of his mother in that he could find, which are few. It’s such an evocative moment: his heightened search as he can’t find it lets us know that this is core to him, even as he ran away from all this to escape the small town, this defines him. We also meet his aunt, and see her competent parenting, but also how much she has buried, how close her feelings and secrets are to the surface, and we also get a sense of his mother, a teenager, a young woman in out of date clothing, a free spirit, someone who stepped out of time in some way, almost captured in amber. I really liked how she started in the story, and how she showed us the story world and it’s core, without using clunky exposition.

This book has an elusive quality, as it weaves in it’s elements. It wants you to follow Jesse down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and to find out more about his life, and Alice, and the town as we go. We get a lot of the elements of Southern Gothic as we go: the smell of swamp, small town where everyone knows everyone, narrow mindedness, God-fearing and church going, but also black magic and voodoo, madness and young ethereal girls, and their punishing, charming fathers. Cults out in the wilderness, and secrets that simmer just below the surface. Jesse is a smart, cynical kid and he’s also bisexual, dresses a little grungy, which in the small town is sometimes exotic and sometimes punishable by a life threatening beating.

At the heart, there’s a mystery, and this is where the book gets a little unfocused. I liked Jesse and piecing together who Alice was and what was going on. I think it basically worked, but sometimes in the middle of the story, it would slow down a little bit. I think that’s OK for Southern Gothic, but it makes for a slow burn if you’re reading this as Horror. It feels like the ending, if I’m being a bit harsh, was a little soft, too. After going on this journey with Jesse, we’ve had hints of cults, dark magic, murder, town secrets, secret languages and these feel like the smoking gun in the room. In the end, none of these are utilised, and another thread is followed. It works, but it feels like there was a payoff with Jesse’s moms story that wasn’t quite met, where a revelation or a more strong answer was foreshadowed. We may come to understand what happened, but there’s still some questions in my mind as to why and why here.

That said, I really liked this. The author’s narrative voice felt unique and confident, and I liked that. The book is weird and ghostly, very Southern, very dreamy and sort of soft with layers of time and other worlds. I love that kind of thing. It’s dark and cynical, and the flipside of the All-American dream, but in a way that’s just expressive of another part of life, not just trying to be edgy or subversive. The author has made an intriguing story world and characters for us. I love Southern Gothic and Gothic Suspense, so for me, this was a little treat. I’d read this author again.

Read It If: for fans of the supernatural, gothic and suspenseful, this should please you. And it might please the fans of the Lovecraftian style. It’s not straight up typical Horror genre fiction, but it’s definitely dark and spooky.

With thanks to HBG Canada for the copy of this book for review.