Ruin Road by Lamar Giles (The Getaway) is an unnerving, spine-tingling paranormal horror novel driven by a frank and sharp dissection of race and class.
Cade Webster, 6'2" with "hands like tennis rackets," is a formidable player for his high school football team. Even though he's the star wide receiver, his rich white teammates won't go near his Black "gangsta" neighborhood and his size and skin color make the white people with whom he interacts perceive him as a threat. Cade wishes people would stop acting so scared around him--a wish that is granted when he unknowingly makes an infernal pact by "buying" it in a pawn shop that deals "in the outer limits of despair." Suddenly everyone around Cade seems to have lost all fear and become more violent. Cade realizes it's because of his wish, and he must find a way to undo the deal before his friends and family suffer more.
In Ruin Road, supernatural chills effortlessly share the lane with equally scary real-life horrors: blatant racism and microaggressions, malevolent power, and instigated suffering. Giles effectively uses the lenses of power and fear to examine these concepts, delivering cutting social commentary--e.g., by demonstrating that an absence of fear can lead people down a path to something truly scary, as when repressed resentment is unleashed. His macabre descriptions ("Fingers crawled over him like bugs, boneless arms looped around him like tentacles") and visual language ("an ice spider skittered up my neck") instill dread and create a creepy atmosphere. This thriller is unsettling, fast-paced, and shrewd. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader