THE DEVOURING LIGHT

Teen musicians end up stranded at a haunted house that’s out of an urban legend.

After their car breaks down on the way to a music festival, Haden Romero and her Phantomic bandmate and best friend, Kizi Kennedy-Oshima, have to hitch a ride on the tour bus belonging to Haden’s childhood reality show co-star and nemesis, Deacon Rex, who’s originally from London. Making things worse, Deacon’s band has a new drummer: Cairo Martin, former Phantomic member and Haden’s ex-girlfriend. The bus goes off course and crashes, separating the teens and dumping them in a canyon near a swamp where mysterious white gravel paths lead to a lit-up manor house. From interstitial chapters, readers get glimpses of the house’s supernatural history and clues to the danger the characters are in, even as they try to rationalize their increasingly disturbing experiences. As well as delightfully deployed slow-burn haunted-house fare, such as signs that someone else is in the house with them, the text revels in body horror; sensitive readers are warned away by the detailed content note preceding the story. The story delves into complicated friendship dynamics and what motivates the young people’s dreams of stardom. Interludes describing found footage prevent the claustrophobia from becoming stale, and the ending is bold and definitive. Deacon is white, Cairo is Black, Kizi presents Japanese American and white, and Haden’s surname may cue her as Latine.

An atmospheric treat for readers who don’t suffer from squeamishness.