All The Dead Lie Down by Kyrie McCauley

[Heather]

At the beginning I thought All the Dead Lie Down, the new Young Adult horror novel by Kyrie McCauley, had very The 13^th Tale by Diane Setterfield vibes. Even though I wasn’t totally wrong, this book has a lot of other elements happening in it, too! Marin, who has just lost her mother, goes to Maine to work for a woman who is—maybe—a childhood friend her mother never mentioned having before. Alice Lovelace has offered Marin a lifeline while she figures out what she’ll do next, so how can she say no? A horror writer who lives in one of the creepiest houses on the Maine coastline, Alice is pretty strange. But the two children Marin is supposed to care for while their mother stays locked in her study writing another best-selling horror novel are even stranger. Things start to get really weird after Evie, the oldest of Alice’s daughters, flunks out of school and comes back to Lovelace House too. When weird becomes potentially and problematically supernatural, Marin isn’t sure what to do. She just knows she can’t leave Wren and Thea alone in this house. And she definitely can’t leave Evie. But is what’s going in in Lovelace House a curse like everyone in town says? Or is it a gift, like Alice says? Gothic and atmospheric with a main character that is desperate to overcome her own anxiety after the worst has actually happened to her, this YA novel is a fun read for teens and for adults alike who love a mysterious setting, supernatural elements, and a few unexpected twists and turns. Maybe you’ll see the first twist coming (I did), but I definitely didn’t see the second one coming until it was right up next to me!