Antioch

More like 3 and a quarter stars. Not bad for a debut novel!
On the cover, Paul Tremblay blurbs, “Antioch is full of twists, dread, and the unsettling fog of ambiguity.”
Whoo! He right about two of those descriptors.
The dread settles on the reader from the first page in Antioch and does not let up. I appreciated that and I was all in. There are some things about Antioch I really, really liked (or I would have stopped reading it). One, the tone. Fabulous. Two, Leonard's voice. Three, the setting. A bookstore with a bar that sells craft beer (I guess mostly Fat Tire?)- I'm in. Where do I sign up?
Balanced with the things that drove me a bit batty, I get the 3 and a quarter stars rating.
To be fair, I have never written a book. I have read thousands of them. So, I plan to tread very lightly here.
First, I really liked this bit: “There was something beautiful about someone asking you to stay with them....because caring was no longer a given in the world. Despite the great universal interconnection of all things, people had still, by and large, chosen not to care.”

Things happen to Bess (coming home to lights on, doors open, bottles smashed, front lawn dug up, etc) and she barely reacts to any of them. In fact, she has no reactions to most of the action in this novel. Even losing two whole days does not have her calling a doctor for help.
For living in this town for a while, she doesn't seem to know anyone except her coworkers and she seems to greatly dislike two of them. WTF is the story with Brandon?
For no reason, there is a chapter or two written in the second person.
When a historical society manages to magically appear in town, complete with a curator who may have answers, Bess can't work hard enough to get out of there-despite claiming to be hunting for answers. In fact, most of her conversations are tempered with “hurry ups” and “I don't have all day” when in fact Bess seems to have nothing but time.
But the main problem here is the ambiguity. I don't mind an unreliable narrator, but man, no one was reliable in this story. Facts were being obscured from the reader and the ending was super unclear. I don't know. I think Leonard was going for an ending similar to The Witch here and, uh, I'm just going to leave it at that. It's a foggy reading and I found it frustrating, especially toward the ending when things should have been falling into place. I kept thinking, why are you telling us the story if you won't tell us the story?

Some things that did not have any effect on my rating, but I feel are worth mentioning. Bess Jackson is black. Jessica Leonard does not appear to be. I really try to champion OwnVoices stories. At the same time, I don't mind when female authors pen male characters and vice versa. So, that's a me problem, and I need to think on that some more.
Two, I just loved holding the copy of this book in my hand. I loved the shape and size. It's slightly taller than a normal trade paperback? I don't know who printed it for Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, but well done!