Colleen Mondor Reviews Who Haunts You by Mark Wheaton
Who Haunts You, Mark Wheaton (Off Limits Press 978-8-9879250-1-0, $13.00, 170pp, tp) September 2023.
Mark Wheaton’s Who Haunts You is a thriller featuring a determined teen detective who cannot be sure of anything she uncovers. Rebecca ‘‘Bex’’ Koeltl is a high school senior in a school that is suddenly suffering an alarming number of student deaths. Yunwen Lei runs off a cliff, Darrell Anolik drives into a delivery van, and Oz Hustis sets his grandmother’s house on fire while he is still inside it. There are grief counsellors and school assemblies and much discussion of academic pressure, but Bex finds all this a waste of time. She is certain that someone compelled her classmates to kill themselves, a ghostly specter that is now coming for her as well.
As Bex starts to investigate, she finds herself forced to consider things that seem impossible. Initially with the help of Oz, whose death she almost witnesses, Bex uncovers more and more unsettling clues about what is going at Claremont High. The adults are all convinced the deceased students were simply struggling with their pending graduations and the school’s strict academic rigor, but Oz captured some terrifying videos before his death and sent them to Bex. She knows he was on to something and when she finds her reality suddenly changing, she becomes convinced that either the same thing happened to the others, or she is losing her mind.
Compounding the drama is how it is affected by Bex’s neurodivergence. (When she sees someone breaking into a school locker, she notes, ‘‘If I had the kind of autism they show on TV, I’d be able to instantly determine whose locker it was by counting the number of lockers from the end and pulling the owner’s identity from some mental catalog of All Use Knowledge. As I have boring, normal autism, it’s just the memorial decorations and flowers around the lockers visible even in the dim hallway that tell me it belonged to Yunwen Lei.’’) Throughout the narrative, Bex notes when autism causes her acute anxiety and she utilizes a checklist of thoughts and actions developed by her therapist to retain control. Just like the deceased students, though, as her reality is sabotaged by an unknown force, she is pushed to the brink. Because she has struggled with controlling impulsive behavior in the past, her family is convinced that autism is the cause of a series of violent outbursts that find her ultimately attacking a classmate who she believes is the real killer. A subsequent trial and sentencing to a psychiatric facility leaves her wondering if maybe they were all right. She can’t stop investigating and in a mind blower of an ending, Wheaton shows that autism might have been what kept Bex alive to find the real villain, as she reaches out for help from an accomplice you will never see coming.
Ultimately, Who Haunts Me has an enormously compelling protagonist in a narrative that escalates tension with every page and Wheaton keeps readers on the edge of their seats as the novel careens to its startling, and satisfying, conclusion.
This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.
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