Review: Moriah
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3 stars. This was really breathtaking; haunting in every sense of the word. I love stories like this, that wear a lot of hats: a historical snapshot, a study of grief as singular driving force, a tapestry that unfolds very slowly, a bleak tangled knot of characters that orbit each other over the course of one week.
Former Rev. Silas Flood travels to a family home called the Yellow House in Moriah, Vermont as a journalist investigating the family’s alleged ability to conjure spirits during nightly seances. This is in the 1870s, and the whole country is deeply spiritually curious as it processes the traumas of the Civil War. There he encounters medium brothers Thaddeus and Ambrose Lynch, their sister Sally, the various guests drawn to their conjuring skills, and the spirits they call from the afterlife. Flood, walking around with his own personal tragedies, becomes swept up in the questions around belief, desire, memory, guilt, and fear that haunt the entire group - as well as family secrets.
It’s a fascinating moment in time wrapped in a very captivating delivery. These characters are super broken - it’s a bleak, disturbing book - but I couldn’t look away as they churned in turmoil. The spirit aspect is very unique and probably not what makes this book horror… I think that would be the deep dive into the horror that is the human experience. Like I said, bleak.
So why 3 stars? 3 stars means I liked it. I have read books of a similar tone (sort of an… exercise-y, literary, biblical allusion-infused, words-at-the-forefront tone with heavy themes - reminds me of something I’d read in school, begging to be inspected and called clever) and they all land around 3 stars for me. I wouldn’t touch this is you’re in a grim mood unless you want to wallow in it. But again, I liked it. I like horror in all its flavors, even its most melancholic.