I was offered a copy of this book with a request for an honest review. This review may contain spoilers.
There are several things I’m scared of: heights, clowns, wax figures, and caves, to name a few. I’m lucky in that most of these make for a good horror novel, and I love to be scared. The most effective? Caves. There’s something about the darkness and the claustrophobia, the isolation and the silence, the ease with which you can get lost beneath the ground, that makes for excellent horror, and When the Night Bells Ring was no exception.
The story itself is pretty simple: two women fleeing climate change find themselves in a ghost town and venture into the abandoned silver mines to find water, only to lose their way in the darkness. They find a diary written 150 years before and read it in the hope of finding a way out within its pages. What they discover instead, while battling dehydration and infection, is that they might not be alone within the mines after all.
Kaplan has created a really effective and engaging horror, and despite the simple premise, the story packs a hell of a punch. It made me not want to sleep at night, both because I wanted to know what happened and because I didn’t want to be alone in the dark. Though Waynoka and Mads’ storyline was told in brief interludes between diary entries, it was by far the scariest part of the novel. The descriptions of the mine and what lies inside are evocative and powerful enough to make the hair on the back of my neck rise just thinking about them.
That’s not to say the diary is boring. Not only is it written incredibly well, feeling like real diary entries, but considering it’s the bulk of the novel, it never feels like the two stories are disjointed. The fabric of one story intertwines brilliantly with the other until you cannot separate the two; while I imagine reading the diary alone would be a fantastic mystery, it would feel incomplete without the conclusion provided by the Dust Devils. The characters in the diary are rich and jump off the page. You cannot help but feel sorry for Lavinia even as the town turns against her. Virgil as a setting is so well done and engaging. It really felt like the inclusive, insular small community turning against outsiders even over their own survival.
And let’s not forget the creatures! I’m not sure what they could be called; for once even I, collector of odd folklore, am unsure if they are based off real stories or just a fascinating twist on an old classic. If they are a product of Kaplan’s imagination, then they are a brilliant example of evolution and worldbuilding, well-suited to the desert environment and utterly terrifying. If they end up being based on real folklore, then I would be delighted to learn more about them.
All in all, When the Night Bells Ring is the perfect read for those dark October nights, for anyone who loves villains or hates caves, or any horror aficionado.
Check out When the Night Bells Ring on Amazon and Goodreads.
About the book
Don’t awaken what sleeps in the dark.
In a future ravaged by fire and drought, two climate refugees ride their motorcycles across the wasteland of the western US, and stumble upon an old silver mine. Descending into the cool darkness of the caved-in tunnels in desperate search of water, the two women find Lavinia Cain’s diary, a settler in search of prosperity who brought her family to Nevada in the late 1860s.
But Lavinia and the settlers of the Western town discovered something monstrous that dwells in the depths of the mine, something that does not want greedy prospectors disturbing the earth. Whispers of curses and phantom figures haunt the diary, and now, over 150 years later, trapped and injured in the abandoned mine, the women discover they’re not alone . . . with no easy way out.
The monsters are still here―and they’re thirsty.
About the author
Jo Kaplan is a Los Angeles based writer and professor. She is the author of the haunted house tale It Will Just Be Us and also writes under the name Joanna Parypinski. Her work has appeared in Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Haunted Nights edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton, and Bram Stoker Award nominated anthology Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College.
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