The Return
Ratings34
Average rating3.5
A group of friends reunite after one of them has returned from a mysterious two-year disappearance in this edgy and haunting debut.
Julie is missing, and no one believes she will ever return - except Elise. Elise knows Julie better than anyone, and feels it in her bones that her best friend is out there and that one day Julie will come back. She’s right. Two years to the day that Julie went missing, she reappears with no memory of where she’s been or what happened to her.
Along with Molly and Mae, their two close friends from college, the women decide to reunite at a remote inn. But the second Elise sees Julie, she knows something is wrong - she’s emaciated, with sallow skin and odd appetites. And as the weekend unfurls, it becomes impossible to deny that the Julie who vanished two years ago is not the same Julie who came back. But then who - or what - is she?
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Wow, did not like this book. The premise is great: four women who were friends from college, young adults living in different cities and kept in touch were stunned when one of them went missing. She returns two years later claiming to remember nothing. Fast forward several months and they meet for a reunion in a creepy, hard to describe, hotel in upstate NY. She (Julie) is the last to arrive and her friends at struck dumb by her appearance (which by the description doesn't seem human) and actions but pretended nothing had changed. The rest of the story is about the weekend which turns out to be very eerie, supernatural, and totally beyond my reading pleasure.
The final reveal was so weird and made no sense. I really was disappointed and disheartened at the bizarre ending. Nothing came together and the story was boring, repetitive, and then just crammed into a strange ending.
An impressive debut, teeming with vivid prose and plenty of genuinely unnerving horror. I'll definitely be on the lookout for whatever this author does next!
