the return book review rachel harrison

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by Rachel Harrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2020

A stylish and well-crafted horror debut.

Two years ago, Julie disappeared while hiking alone in Acadia National Park. Now she’s back.

Julie’s husband, Tristan, and her best friends, Elise, Mae, and Molly, were devastated when she didn’t return home from her trip. After a year, a funeral was held with no body. Everyone close to Julie was certain she was dead except for Elise, and on the two-year anniversary of her vanishing, Julie proves Elise right. Tristan finds her sitting on their porch swing with no memory of the time she was gone. With so many questions surrounding Julie’s return, Elise is surprised when Mae arranges a girls' trip to the Catskills' eclectic (themed rooms!) Red Honey Inn over Columbus Day weekend. Julie is the last to arrive, and her emaciated appearance is jarring. She’s not the vibrant woman Elise remembers, but she’s undeniably her beloved friend, and the four look forward to a fun reunion. The weather is frightful, though; Elise’s room is frigid; and Julie is acting very oddly, to say the least. Julie was a vegetarian, but now she has a ravenous hunger for rare meat and smells like an abattoir. Then there’s the shadowy figure Elise keeps glimpsing in her room. Harrison skillfully portrays the bond between the four longtime friends, complete with secrets and tension, but always against a background of palpable affection. As Elise, who narrates, says, “I’m so happy to be with them and to be the version of myself I am when I’m around them.” Unfortunately, though, it's increasingly obvious to Elise, Mae, and Molly that they need to get to the bottom of what’s happening to Julie, who is deteriorating before their eyes. Harrison successfully sustains a low, visceral dread throughout that eventually builds to a shocking crescendo, and whispers of The Shining haunt the Red Honey Inn’s gloriously gaudy halls. Patient readers who appreciate a slow burn with an explosive payoff will be rewarded. This girls’ trip has teeth.

Pub Date: March 24, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09866-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

PARANORMAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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More About This Book

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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BOOK REVIEW

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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Molly, Mae, Julie and Elise are best friends. Though their adult lives have moved them across the country and onto different career paths, the bonds they forged in college remain fiercely strong. Mae is calm, selfless and logical, while Molly is the funniest of the quartet and the one with the mean streak. Julie and Elise think of themselves as the closest, so similar that their friendship swings between declarations of love and passive-aggressive fights.

When Julie disappears on a hike in Acadia National Park, Elise is the only one who doesn’t believe --- even after two years --- that she is dead. And when Julie returns, almost the same but fundamentally changed, Elise does her best to ignore the terrible and shocking truth she sees about Julie now.

THE RETURN follows these four friends over the course of a horrific long weekend together at a bizarre and isolated hotel after Julie comes home, having no memories of the past two years. Rachel Harrison’s first book has elements of a mystery, a coming-of-age story and a horror novel.

"Harrison puts much effort into telling readers just who her characters are psychologically, which is mostly compelling.... THE RETURN offers readers some promising ideas and genuine scares..."

Elise’s refusal to believe that Julie is dead is textbook denial. Julie’s return means that Elise has not lost her best friend after all, but it doesn’t mean that things are simple between them. Mae arranges for the four ladies to meet at a funky hotel in the Catskill Mountains to relax and reconnect. She, Molly and Elise agree that they won’t ask Julie about what happened to her. They will respect her assertion that she cannot remember the last two years and how she managed to get home, wearing what she was wearing the day she went missing. Elise is stressed about the cost of the vacation and anxious to see Julie.

It is immediately obvious to Elise and the others that Julie is different. Her skin is sallow and her teeth are horrible, and even her diet has changed. But it is easy to attribute all of this to the trauma she has experienced. Less easy to ignore is the feeling Elise gets from her --- creepy, frightening and possibly physically changing before her eyes. Mae and Molly also sense that something is wrong, yet the three of them try to make the best of the time with Julie and hope to learn more about what she has gone through and how it has affected her. By the time the hotel itself --- awful enough already with its strange noises, overdone rooms and inattentive staff --- seems to respond to Julie’s increasingly distressing appearance and behavior, and when Mae becomes severely ill, it is already too late to stop the terror that is unfolding.

This is a curious book. Harrison puts much effort into telling readers just who her characters are psychologically, which is mostly compelling. However, Elise in particular is an inconsistent figure. That may be less of Harrison’s fault and more about the way characters in similar novels act against their own best interest, unwilling to see evil for what it is. The supernatural elements are piled on heavily at the end, and Harrison is not interested in really explaining the source of Julie’s transformation. There are some eerie scenes, and the Red Honey Hotel is somehow both menacing and comical.

It would miss the mark to categorize this as a horror novel; it is much more about a particular set of friends who experience horror. The four share a kind of banter or repartee that seems a bit young for them, and each of them is definitely of a type. They are love ’em or hate ’em kinds of characters.

THE RETURN offers readers some promising ideas and genuine scares, but ultimately is not as cohesive as it could be. Still, it marks of the debut of a writer with a lot of potential.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on March 27, 2020

The Return by Rachel Harrison

• Publication Date: October 6, 2020
• Genres: Fiction , Horror , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Berkley
• ISBN-10: 0593098676
• ISBN-13: 9780593098677

A BOOK BLOG FOR ALL MY DARK & TWISTY READS

Review: The Return by Rachel Harrison

Berkley | 2020

Filed Under: Hopeful, despite the rotted teeth

This was definitely interesting. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but that wasn’t a bad thing this time. It’s a novel I won’t soon forget and the catalyst for my decision to not read horror novels involving teeth for the rest of my fucking life. Thank you very much.

This is hard to review because it’s essentially a spoiler minefield from beginning to end, but I’ll do my best to explain why you should read this book if you’re looking for, what I’m calling, Girls’ Weekend Horror.

Honestly, I didn’t hate this. I might have actually really liked it. I think my expectations were tempered by the abundance of disappointed reviews I came across before I ever cracked this one open. I get some of the criticisms, but for me, I had a good time. And I wasn’t even high!

Elise, Julie, Mae and Molly are college best friends who have drifted apart because of life shit. If you’ve aged passed your early 20s, you know how it goes. It’s so easy to be best friends in college, but once you’ve graduated and gone your separate ways on your own life paths, it’s not as easy to maintain that bond or the regularity of seeing each other.

It also doesn’t help when one of you goes fucking missing.

Julie, while solo hiking through Acadia National Park, as one does when they’re living out the Wild interlude of their life, disappears. No trace. No hope to find her in the 47,000-acre wilderness. After so much time has passed, Julie is legally declared dead. A funeral is held. Everyone moves on as best they can, but the friendship between the remaining three women falters as Elise refuses to accept that Julie is really dead.

Two years after being declared dead, Julie comes home and Elise is vindicated. Julie has no idea where she’s been or what happened to her, and her odd behaviour does nothing to abate the concerns of her husband and friends. But, to celebrate Julie’s return and try to put their friendship back on course, the four women organize a girls’ weekend at a fucking weird hotel, which brilliantly set the atmosphere for the bulk of the novel. It gave me some heavy Kubrick-esque vibes.

Once the women are at the hotel, a huge chunk of the novel is simply their interactions – conversations, reminiscing, airing out problems and some light bickering. It certainly rang true of female friendships and I found the personalities, conversations and issues to be very honest and relatable, if not a bit unlikable at times. However, it’s in this chunk of the novel that most of the creepy things should have been set up and I found that was delayed too long. At some point, you’ll wonder if you’re reading a horror novel or just women’s fiction.

The novel picks up as the weekend rolls on and the physical and mental state that Julie is in just can’t be ignored any longer – think decaying and smelling like a used diaper filled with raw sewage. I won’t say any more than that.

The genuine quality of the women’s interactions stays canon as they try to figure out what to do about Julie, or if there is even a reason to do something about Julie, with some of the friends more scared than others.

And let me tell you, if I was in that group of friends, put me in the fucking creeped-out camp.

There were some moments in this novel that legit made me uneasy and put me on edge. The horror was unique, especially the fact that no men were really involved at all. I’m sorry, but I loved that. This was about women in all their forms – reprehensible, caring, good and evil and strong. And it was about friendships – how they change, how they last and how they feel.

It was a horror novel with heart. And it’s one of the better books I’ve read this year.

An edgy and haunting debut novel about a group of friends who reunite after one of them has returned from a mysterious two-year disappearance. Julie is missing, and the missing don’t often return. But Elise knows Julie better than anyone, and she feels in her bones that her best friend is out there, and that one day she’ll 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. 

Book source: The publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a review.

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Review | The Return by Rachel Harrison

Elise, Julie, Mae, and Molly have been best friends forever. When Julie goes missing, everyone except Elise believes she’s dead. Two years later, Julie returns with no memories of what happened.  In order to get things back to normal, the group goes on a girls’ trip to a kitschy hotel. Amidst the disconcerting setting of the hotel and the awkwardness of Julie’s strange behaviour, the friends find that nothing is as it seems. Something is out there, and they might be in danger.

Above all else, I knew two truths about Julie. The first was that she was the most stubborn, most determined person I’d ever met. And the second was that she loved attention. Julie would never be missing. 

I enjoyed The Return ‘s blend of friendship drama and horror! The characters are messy, imperfect people who have inside jokes and a long history, and their friendship feels authentic. Yet there is also an unspoken truth about Julie’s situation. I was frustrated at the lack of communication but the book does a good job explaining why they behave the way they do. Their insecurities, trust, fears, and love for each other drive the story forward.

While the book shows the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the four women, the story is told from Elise’s point of view. She is complicated and has made mistakes, but there is no doubt how much she loves her friends. Molly and Mae provide strong supporting characters, each with their own worries and past. Julie is more of an enigma. We don’t get to know her well, and the mystery surrounding her disappearance hangs in a dark cloud over the interactions she has with the others.

There are some really creepy scenes, especially the first night at the hotel. Elise’s overactive imagination is what I have too so I could relate! The detailed description of the colourful, garish hotel rooms provides an unsettling atmosphere to the story. But I was disappointed that the hotel setting ends up not playing a role in the plot. I also found the conclusion a little lackluster.

Still, The Return is an entertaining debut about the horrors of lost friendship and how far you would go for the ones you love. I hope there’s a movie adaptation!

I received a digital copy from the publisher and Netgalley for review purposes.

About the author: Rachel Harrison

Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary

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Rachel Harrison | 3.74 | 139 ratings and reviews

Ranked #46 in Nicholas Sparks

#1 New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Sparks returns with a moving new novel about an injured army doctor and the two women whose secrets will change the course of his life.

Trevor Benson never intended to move back to New Bern, North Carolina. But when a mortar blast outside the hospital where he worked as an orthopedic surgeon sent him home from Afghanistan with devastating injuries, the dilapidated cabin he'd inherited from his grandfather seemed as good a place to regroup as any.

Tending to his grandfather's beloved bee hives while preparing for...

Tending to his grandfather's beloved bee hives while preparing for a second stint in medical school, Trevor isn't prepared to fall in love with a local . . . yet, from their very first encounter, Trevor feels a connection with deputy sheriff Natalie Masterson that he can't ignore. But even as she seems to reciprocate his feelings, she remains frustratingly distant, making Trevor wonder what she's hiding.

Further complicating his stay in New Bern is the presence of a sullen teenage girl, Callie, who lives in the trailer park down the road. Claiming to be 17, she works at the local sundries store and keeps to herself. Discovering that she was once befriended by his grandfather, Trevor hopes Callie can shed light on the mysterious circumstances of his grandfather's death, but she offers few clues - until a crisis triggers a race that will uncover the true nature of Callie's past, one more intertwined with the elderly man's passing than Trevor could have ever anticipated.

In his quest to unravel Natalie and Callie's secrets, Trevor will learn the true meaning of love and forgiveness . . . and that in life, to move forward, we must often return to the place where it all began.

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Book Review: The Return by Rachel Harrison

When Elise’s best friend Julie goes missing on a solo hiking trip in Acadia National Park, everyone – from her husband to her closest friends – accepts that she’s not coming home. People go missing all the time and some never return. But some do. Elise knows Julie better than anyone and she believes that her friend is still alive. Even still, it’s a shock when, precisely two years after she disappeared, Julie resurfaces with no memory of what happened to her. On the surface Julie might seem like the same person but Elise can’t shake the feeling that there’s something off with her friend.

Seeking to reconnect and re-establish their once-close bond, Elise and Julie reunite with their friends, Mae and Molly, at a remote hotel in the Catskill Mountains. The Red Honey Inn is miles from anywhere, a sprawling “pastel Frankstein” estate with an unnatural amalgamation of architectural styles, garish themed rooms and peculiar staff. It’s a cloying, claustrophobic and creepy place – and that’s even before anything sinister transpires. As the weekend unfolds and tensions surface, bad weather traps the four friends in the hotel, and it soon becomes impossible for Elise, Mae and Molly to deny that this version of Julie is not the same as the Julie who disappeared two years ago.

Rachel Harrison’s debut is a disquieting tale of love, fear, envy, obsession and the bonds that bind friends. With vibes that range from Stephen King’s The Shining  to the Diablo Cody penned supernatural-horror movie  Jennifer’s Body,  it carries all the classic tropes of a horror story – an eerie location, odd characters, gruesome deaths and mysterious disappearances – yet a huge part of the plot is psychological too. The four friends can leave the hotel at any point but they feel compelled to stay – for Julie, for each other – even when strange things start happening around them. It’s obvious from the off that Julie isn’t ok – she’s changing physically and her behaviour is beyond unsettling but nobody will confront her. Is it the hotel that makes them abandon reason, or their own minds?

Harrison writes horror exceptionally well. Her descriptions are palpably revolting and so full of suspense that you feel constantly on edge. But central to The Return  – and perhaps more important than the physically horrifying elements of the story – is its exploration of female friendships; the adoration, the rivalry, the resentments and the co-dependence that can often surpass common sense. These women are damaged and desperate to please each other, and there’s not a chapter that goes by where you don’t want to shake some sense into at least one of them – especially Elise, who refuses to acknowledge what’s right in front of her eyes. The group’s inability to be open and honest with each other gets incredibly frustrating as the book progresses but at that point the horror kicks up a gear and those earlier niggles all but fade into the blood-soaked background.

Dark, disturbing and gory enough to make sensitive readers a little green around the gills, The Return is a book that will haunt you for days after. It’s been two weeks since I finished it and I still feel traumatised…

The Return is out now in ebook and will be published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton on 10 September 2020.

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The Return by Rachel Harrison – Review

By Sarah Morgan

Marketing people love a good slogan, don’t they? The bright spark who thought to describe Rachel Harrison’s debut novel as ‘ Sex and the City meets Stephen King’ probably spent a lot of time patting his or herself on the back.

However, they were doing the author something of a disservice by not recognising what an original voice she is.

I’m almost loath to write too much about the plot because I don’t want to give anything away; the joy of The Return is in its sharp, left-hand turns and unexpected climax.

At the centre of the story is Julie, a married twentysomething who, one sunny morning, decides to go for a hike near her home in Maine (which is, admittedly, Stephen King country, so I should have known early on that something bad was going to happen to her).

“Terrifying”

A memorial service takes place in an attempt to give her loved ones some form of closure. And then, sure enough, she reappears and sets about picking up the pieces of her life again.

But Julie has changed. No surprise there, you might think; after all, she was missing in the wilderness for two years and claims to have no memory of what happened to her. But, weeks later, when her friends organise a reunion at a remote hotel, it becomes clear something is very seriously wrong…

And that’s all I’m going to say. Anything more would ruin it for would-be readers by giving Harrison’s intriguing and terrifying corkscrew-like twists away.

Every aspiring author must dream of seeing their work in print and on shelves in bookshops. For poor Rachel Harrison, an American writer with a degree in Writing for Film & Television, The Return was due to be published in April but was pushed back, presumably by the onset of Covid-19, until now.

Is it worth waiting for? Absolutely. Just ignore that rather generic title because there’s nothing run of the mill about this tale. In fact, you might prefer reading it during daylight hours – this is not cosy bedtime reading.

‘The Return’ by Rachel Harrison is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 hardback – out 10th September

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Book Review

The return by rachel harrison.

by Carrie S · Mar 24, 2020 at 4:00 am · View all 2 comments

by Rachel Harrison

March 24, 2020 · Berkley

More Info →

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Genre: Horror , Mystery/Thriller

Oh guys, I cannot handle creepy books, and this was a creepy book, and not a romance, and also gross and scary. It was also a book that I devoured in a single day and could not get out of my mind. I was sold on this book by the promise of feminist horror, and that’s what I got, so if feminist horror is your jam then you will probably like this book about four friends and a very bad hotel.

Once upon a time, Mae, Molly, Elise, and Julie became friends at college. They don’t have much in common other than finely honed sarcasm skills and trauma in their past. Of the four friends, Elise (the book’s narrator) and Julie are the closest. So when Julie disappears while on a hike and is presumed dead, Elise is sure that Julie is still alive. Surely, Elise thinks, she would feel it if Julie died. Points to Elise, because two years after disappearing Julie turns up with our old friend amnesia (or, as I like to say, AMNESIA!). Shortly after Julie’s return, Mae and Molly decide that what they all need is a weekend at a kitschy resort in the Catskills Mountains so they can re-bond. Points again to Elise who thinks this will be too much, too soon.

People. Know your genre. If you are in a rom-com, especially a musical rom-com, then by all means go stay at a kitschy hotel in the woods. Wonderful things will occur and you will open your heart in a non-literal fashion. In horror, AVOID THE HOTEL. AVOID THE WOODS. THE OPENING OF YOUR HEART WILL BE LITERAL.

Since this is horror, one approaches this book assuming that the hotel will be full of ominous issues involving the warping of time and space, and one is correct. Also, in a rom-com, AMNESIA! Is surprisingly promising, but in horror – not so much. It’s not a spoiler to say that the friends immediately realize that Julie is just not the same as her pre-disappearance self, what with her new and awful body odor, the fact that her teeth keep falling out and her new habit of consuming nothing but alcohol and meat, preferably raw.

In terms of atmosphere and body horror, this book is not subtle but it sure is effective, starting with an overpowering sense that something is just Not Quite Right. The hotel is supposed to be cute, with garishly themed rooms, but it misses the cute mark and sails straight into oppressively tacky. Observe the Juliet room:

It’s obscenely pink. Hot pink carpet, metallic pink floral wallpaper, crystal chandeliers dripping from the ceiling like stalactites…a silky magenta bedspread makes sporadic appearances beneath an excess of fuzzy pink pillows. ..The whole room has an overpowering smell of rose.

I’m already screaming “RUN!” and nothing has even happened yet. Even the landscape is off:

It’s been a warm fall, and the leaves are confused. Some are fiercely green, ignorant of the fact that it’s October, or perhaps aware and defiant. Others got the memo and have dutifully turned themselves yellow, orange, red. The surrounding wood is dense. It gives me the feeling the hotel shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t have intruded. It gives me the feeling that I shouldn’t be here.

For the strengths and weaknesses of this book, look no further than the above paragraph. Happily, it contains subtle warnings that things are going to go wrong, with a sense of claustrophobia and a sense of cosmic un-right-ness. The leaves, in my opinion, are a clever, telling, and original touch. This book excels at using small details to convey a lot of information.

Unhappily, it goes on to have the narrator point out that these are signs of badness as if I hadn’t noticed. The woods make you nervous? The hell you say! I thought they were enfolding the hotel like a soft blanky. My bad. Thanks for setting me straight.

The strengths and weaknesses of the book also play out in how the friends are described. They are united by the fact that they are cynical, shallow, self-pitying, judgmental, self-centered, and resistant to any honest discussion of feelings:

For being close friends, the closest friends any of us have, we don’t often talk about our life struggles or our emotions. We don’t share our feelings, at least not in-depth. Only when we’re hammered or desperate. We’re all repressed, and that’s how we like it. That’s part of why we’re close. We have a mutual understanding.

It took me a long time to figure out why I should care about any of these people, and why on earth they became friends in the first place. But then they ended up piling onto the same bed in a hotel room and I saw how their friendship played out as an exercise in escape and companionship:

After the few remaining pieces of pizza have gone cold and dry, we abandon the food debate for one about music, then for one about which side we would take in famous feuds, and then we fall down a dark rabbit hole that starts with a survey of the biggest dicks we’ve ever seen, turns to John Holmes, a hard left to the Wonderland Murders, the Manson murders, Roman Polanski, Mia Farrow, Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, The First Wives Club and ends with a sing along of “You Don’t Own Me.”

The navigational markers in that paragraph cracked me up, and personally, I felt so seen.

Ultimately, Julie’s very existence after two years of disappearance is a big truth grenade lobbed at a very fragile structure of denial. The more monstrous she becomes, the more the group’s ability to pretend they she is OK and that they are OK collapses. Just as Elise refused to believe Julie was dead even after Mae and Molly gave up, Elise is the last character to face off with whatever Julie has become. If anything damages the thematic continuity of the story, it’s that the weird hotel stuff is never explained, a grating hole in an otherwise cohesive story.

This is a pretty flawed book, what with the narrator spelling everything out and the plot holes, and yet it stuck with me because of the details and because of the strength of the emotion. The book is rich in description and in portrayals of the mundane moments of friendship. In a way it’s a love letter to the banal intimacy of friendship, one that involves toothbrushes, gummy vitamins, dirty dishes, all the little things of a shared life:

I can hear Julie’s laugh, like she’s next to me, like she’s got her head on my shoulder. I can smell her shampoo, her scalp. That’s love. Knowing the smell of someone else’s head. I get whiffs of it sometimes, randomly. What a funny kind of ghost. A phantom scent.

The book also stuck with me because of what it says about grief, love, and denial. The women have based their friendship on a refusal to face truths about themselves and about others, carried to an extreme by Elise’s refusal to believe that Julie is dead. Julie’s physical deterioration mirrors the growing deterioration of Elise’s denial, and Elise’s growing terror matches Julie’s growing inability to maintain her own denial. Julie is a powerful and tragic character, and what happens to her is also a powerful metaphor.

This a scary story because scary things happen (chases and gore and jump scares, oh my!) but it’s a powerful story because it’s really about friendship, truth, and grief. There’s so much powerful emotional and universal truth behind the body horror, and so much woven in commentary on everything from how patriarchy damages women, to how women bond for survival even as they judge one another, to how our college selves change after college ends.

Overall it’s about grief. And yes, about how the woods are not your friend, and how stupid movies are important, and shared jokes and stories, and “you can’t go wrong with pizza,” and how, when the vents start dripping blood, you should leave, immediately, and file a complaint on Yelp as a service to others. Seriously. Even in a rom-com, that’s not good.

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<tangent> I get whiffs of it sometimes, randomly. What a funny kind of ghost. A phantom scent. Only yesterday–really–a friend told me she’d re-watched the 1980-ish French movie The Story of Adele H. Here’s what I remember about this particular movie: Someone sitting near me in the theatre was wearing an unusual, old-fashioned, musky, not-unpleasant perfume. In my memory that scent will forever be joined to Adele H. </tangent>

This sounds like exactly what I want to read right now. I know, I’m weird, but for some reason, in times of stress, I look to scary/violent books and movies. I think it’s some kind of externalizing of my stress. I’ll be getting this one asap!

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Friends Forever Ever

The Return by Rachel Harrison

September 1, 2023 by Jake 2 Comments

Read as part of CBR15Bingo: In the wild. The story takes place mostly in a hotel set in the wild and also may-or-may-not feature a shifting character. You’ll have to read to find out!

It’s such a joy when you pick up a story and connect with the writer’s style.

I had been interested in this one for a few years since I saw it at the library. Horror where a best friend disappears and returns but is not the same…that had me curious. But I was put off by the reviews, most of which dinged the style and the ending.

I won’t comment much on the ending; I’m still thinking about it. But Rachel Harrison’s style really works for me. I liked the way she used the main character’s POV to tell a broader story, give characterization to the friends, build the tension in a real way.

Yeah this a horror story that is somewhat close to its premise (how close, you’ll have to discover for yourself) but really at the heart of it, this is a tale about friends and their changes, their losses, their grief, their attempts to find normalcy in a world that’s moved on. That might not make for the best horror hook where people just want a big scary monster to be running around, destruction at its feet (there is some of that). But it made for a very readable tale where I felt invested to the last page.

I don’t know who to recommend this to. I’m not sure fans of classic horror will like it. Maybe folks who like psychological dramas with horror curlicues? I don’t know. I’d recommend it to me. It was a great read.

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The Return Hardcover – March 19, 2020

• Print length 298 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date March 19, 2020
• Dimensions 6.38 x 1.18 x 9.29 inches
• ISBN-10 1529351952
• ISBN-13 978-1529351958
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hodder & Stoughton (March 19, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 298 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1529351952
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1529351958
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.38 x 1.18 x 9.29 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #2,252,472 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Rachel harrison.

Rachel Harrison is the national bestselling author of BLACK SHEEP, SUCH SHARP TEETH, CACKLE and THE RETURN, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, as an Audible Original, and in her debut story collection BAD DOLLS. She lives in western New York with her husband and their cat/overlord.

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