Samantha Mabry (Tigers, Not Daughters) deftly blends psychological horror and magical realism in this engrossing, deeply unsettling YA novel about how a teen girl's efforts to find her friend are stymied by the missing girl's disconcerting young housemates.
High school graduate Case has returned to the Texas county where she grew up to visit her best friend, Drea. When Case arrives at the ancient, ivy-covered house, tucked deep in the forest, where Drea has been living with a group of young people, however, Drea is missing. The young woman's housemates claim with a specious aloofness that they don't know where she went and won't explain why all of Drea's stuff is gone. Case, stuck without a car or cell reception in a place she loves yet always believed would destroy her, searches for answers in Drea's hidden journal entries and in her woodland hideaway. Each maddening clue--Drea's burnt notebook, her cryptic stories hinting at a rising tension in the house--fuels Case's suspicion about Drea's housemates.
Clever Creatures of the Night pulls taut across a single day of terse conversations, uncovered lies, and violent moments. Case's acerbic, comedic, and compelling third-person narrative is strengthened by her complexities, such as surviving a house fire that has left her nerves misfiring. Mabry's sentences sing, shaping a sinister and surreal setting marked by abnormally wild creatures and an off-kilter house. An unnerving yet addictive foreboding underlies every moment of this gritty read-in-one-sitting mystery. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer