First published 2022
Dr. Helen Hildreth runs a psychiatric treatment center in Vermont where she's known for her work with the mentally ill. At home, she cares for her grandchildren Vi and Eric, teaching them to tend their pets and cooking their meals. When Gran brings home Iris, a silent and skittish girl, Vi welcomes her eagerly. The three children form a Monster Club, cataloguing creatures and planning how to defeat them while they ride bikes and meet secretly in their clubhouse. Iris slowly emerges from her shell as she joins their adventures. Decades later in 2019, podcast host Lizzy Shelley travels to Vermont to investigate a child abduction and reported monster sighting for her show Monsters Among Us. Lizzy pursues the creature because she knows monsters exist. One of them is her sister.
Genres: contemporary, adult-fiction, psychological-thriller, mystery-thriller, horror-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, suspenseful, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: dark-secrets, dual-timeline, found-family, sibling-bond, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Vermont, psychiatric-treatment-center
Period: 1990s, 2019
352 pages · Paperback · Gallery/Scout Press
Content warnings: child-abuse, kidnapping, mental-illness