A haunting mystery about lost girls and the woman driven to find them, from the author of the contemporary classic Lives of the Monster Dogs. Anna Fort wants to be a supportive wife, even if that means accompanying her husband for the winter of 1918 to a remote, frozen island estate so he can finish his book as the guest of an eccentric millionaire. When she learns three girls are missing from a school run by their host, Anna realizes finding them is up to her—even if that means risking her husband’s career, and possibly her life. Her husband’s masterpiece-in-progress features strange meteorological anomalies along with wild speculations about “facts” he believes scientists hide from the public. Most people think Charles Fort is a crackpot. That’s about to change now that wealthy Claude Arkel is his patron. Yet Anna is sure something’s not right on Prosper Island, though the alarming return of her “troubles” makes her question her own sanity. Is the figure in the woods really the ghost of her long-lost friend Mary, or a product of her disturbed imagination? Accompanied reluctantly by a fellow guest, the elegant and troubled Stella Bixby, Anna embarks on a dangerous quest to find the missing girls before Arkel finds her—or her own mind unravels. A contemporary feminist tale with a dreamlike, gothic setting, King Nyx reintroduces readers, twenty-five years after her acclaimed debut, to one of our most astonishingly imaginative storytellers.

NUBClub did not enjoy this novel. The one positive point we agreed about was that Kirsten Bakis is a good writing and the style of the book was generally good. Beyond that though, we found King Nyx almost laughable as a story. The plot centers around a woman married into a researcher in strange phenomenon as they are invited to an eccentric rich man's island possibly to get funding for the husband's research. From there, they encounter another couple (a hypnotherapist and his wife) as well as other oddities of the island including a gas-mask-wearing driver, dead bodies, strange lights, and a command that they be quarantined in a small set of cabins before they are brought to the main house. The plot quickly goes off the rails at this point. It almost seems like a random grab bag of plot elements: lost girls, electroshock, automatons, crow spirits, forgotten trauma. It simply doesn't add up. The reveals of the book weren't surprising or intriguing -- they were odd and often ridiculous. And the final reveal when you get to the house is actually laughable. The story can't seem to make up its mind about whether it's a story of magic and spirits or a story of lies and hidden identities. Bakis wants to give her protagonist an arc when she steps out of the shadow of her husband and previous employers to succeed at a feminist mission of saving young girls, but the way the story ties together is just so arbitrary you can't get on the ride. NUBClub says pass on this one.