Rating:

Ghosts and Submarines and Secrets

Author: Laurel Hightower

He died screaming. His mangled, crushed body still held together enough to show that his last moments were both terrifying and agonizing. No one knows who – or what – killed him. The only clue is the nearly unrecognizable corpse, surrounded by a glut of salt water.

Cam is still grieving Tony, her dead husband, but her feelings waver between sadness and hatred. The investigation around his death revealed a long-time mistress, and whatever Tony was involved in, whatever he made angry, is now after Cam and her five-year-old daughter, Samantha.

With nowhere safe to go, Cam decides to return to her Uncle Bert’s house, which she inherited after his death. That’s when she learns that Tony kept a lot of secrets – taking his mistress to see Uncle Bert as they all three worked together on something dangerous, otherworldly. And then Tony hid the truth of Uncle Bert’s death as well.

As Cam starts to uncover just what Tony was involved in, Uncle Bert’s house comes alive around her. Sounds of terrified people wake her in the night. Someone speaking rapid Russian over crackling static booms from empty rooms. The house tilts and shifts. Disaster is very near, and whenever the house finishes living out the ghost’s last moments, the people in it will die just like Uncle Bert, just like Tony.

But running is no longer an option. The ghosts found Tony far from Uncle Bert’s, after all, and Sam is already seeing and talking to entities beyond the grave. Cam has to figure out what her husband and uncle were doing, and she must stop the cycle before it’s too late for all of them.

I so desperately wanted to like this book. I discovered Laurel Hightower first through a book club pick – Below. I fell in love with the surrealism, the weirdness, the mixture of horror and heady emotions. In Below Hightower oscillates between painting a brutal portrait and revealing something about our inner lives – our strengths and fears, how the world around us molds us, and how surviving is more than just walking away from the monsters. I soon followed with Day of the Door, which included all the same elements while delving even further into a dark, desiccated world. Hightower doesn’t shy away from hard subjects – domestic abuse, child abuse, mental illness, and the very real ghosts that haunt and shape us. I had hoped for more of the same with The Silent Key, but unfortunately this narrative is muddled, unsure of what it wants to tell, where it wants to go, what it wants to emphasize and why.

It begins strong. We feel the terror in Cam, her horror and betrayal. We feel her rage at her husband, nicely layered with her grief. It was page turning – but then it stalled. The action ceased, the character reactions became confusing, with all the old horror movie mistakes thrown into play (leaving the child, ignoring warnings, putting personal feelings over common sense, etc.). Soon, we have a house full of people doing very little very slowly, waiting for their inevitable doom.

As the tension drains, everything becomes repetitive. Cam is furious about her husband’s mistress, especially when the woman reaches out. She has a fractured relationship with her daughter, who still loves her father and is apparently talking to his ghost. Her friend/old/cohort/bodyguard/brother Dimi is mysterious and weird, but she never actually asks him why or delves into his midnight wonderings. Her love-interest next door, Eric, promises to lighten the tension and teach her about finding hope in human affection again – even though this is a super dumb time to do that when she should be trying not to die. Meanwhile, Cam’s old friend, Rick, is calling her occasionally to report on weirder goings’ on that don’t really go anywhere. We get bored. We wonder who the hell are all these people, and why they are all necessary?

Eventually, it becomes obvious that the ghosts in the house died on a submarine. Why the recreation of this accident is happening in a house is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t fit. Maybe if they were on a submarine or an old ship or anywhere relatively near the water it would fit. As it is, it’s a weird segue – and the key. Yeah, it’s not a locked door key but CB slang. It supposedly ties the ghosts into Cam’s life – except it is very much an inorganic stretch. By this point, however, we’re bored and just turning pages, hoping it will end already.

Finally, towards the end of the book, we start to get answers, but they are just handed over. An unlikely confluence of convenient events and liaisons comes together, giving us a complete picture of an overly wrought, under explained plot that only really makes sense because the author tells us it does, and the characters seem satisfied. But don’t look too closely, because once you pick at that thread the entire thing will unravel.

Oh – and the cover and all those comparisons to books like Jaws and Nick Cutter’s The Deep – completely misleading. This book only has one short sequence in the water (with someone who cannot dive conveniently diving very well because the plot needed it). The rest of the book takes place sitting in Eric’s living room with the characters taking phone calls and Cam jealously bickering about the dead husband’s ex and his ghostly presence.

Overall, I disliked this book so much that I just took a break from my beloved Hightower. I will be back, though. Her other books were soul searching and haunting, but this one left me with a bad taste. Not recommended.

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)