Book Review: The Screaming Child by Scott Adlerberg

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“Human monsters lurked in plain sight, dreaming of their past cruelties, plotting new harm to inflict.”

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The Screaming Child is a psychological horror/mystery tale told from the vantage point of Eleanor (“Elle”) Vigors, a mother and writer grieving the disappearance of her 12-year-old son, Grahame. The storyline unfolds in both a present-day timeline and non-linear flashbacks, laying the groundwork for Elle’s toxic relationships, marital struggles, personal trauma and frustrations, and neglect of Grahame, who believes that she only cares about her research and book-writing.

A detective mystery enthusiast, Grahame begins acting strangely after a neighborhood boy is found murdered in the local park, refusing to tell his parents what he’s up to and disappearing a month later, leaving Elle feeling culpable, as though her inattention rendered them strangers. Elle’s struggles lead her to relocate to a spartan, remote shack in the valley — a mountain-ensconced place days from the city that feels like “a separate planet” — where she reclaims personal autonomy and attempts to deal with and distract herself from her grief by resuming her research on Francoise Gilbert, a wealthy explorer and writer brutally murdered after penning a book about the nearby timberlands. While there, Elle hears screams that she believes belong to Grahame, leading her on a perilous journey into dangerous territories that may or may not yield the answers she desperately seeks.

This book is a bleak, creepy, and compelling journey filled with malice, cruelty, anger, and sadness. Through her vitriolic thoughts and inner suffering, Elle makes the reader feel her guilt, devastation, obsession, and fury, which in turn makes the reader long for her to succeed in solving the two great mysteries driving and derailing her life: the disappearance of Grahame and the murder of Francoise Gilbert. Filled with dark, twisted histories and uber-eerie gothic elements, The Screaming Child is a layered, sinister, and haunting novella of loss, grief, acceptance, redemption, and closure.

Thank you to BookSirens and Ghoulish Books for allowing me to read and review a free e-version of this recently-released novella.

❤Amanda

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