Colleen Mondor Reviews Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear by Robin Wasley
Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear, Robin Wasley (Simon & Schuster 978-1-665-91460-4, $19.99, hc, 400pp) February 2024. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.
The tourist town of Llewellyn, AKA Wellsie, is famous for the magic that used to be there. Just like Springfield is the town where Lincoln was born, and Roswell is where aliens might have landed, Wellsie is where something happened once. It’s a town on a fault line, where magical energy used to release, and just like other fault-line towns, folks come to see what things are like at “the place where magic lies sealed beneath the earth”. A group of unknown Guardians, who possess the Keys to keep the fault lines closed, are the magical security guards of Wellsie. All this means that Isidora ‘‘Sid’’ Spencer goes to school, works at a local coffee shop (where she deals with way too much tourist traffic) and hangs out with her loveable family without paying too much attention to what the fault lines mean. Then, someone kills a Guardian and releases a glut of magic and everything goes to hell in Wellsie.
Robin Wasley’s Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear is a fantasy suspense with first-rate appeal that blew my mind when I first read it. Just as we’ve seen in the best TV and movies (Stranger Things, Attack the Block), sometimes you can be having a quiet day, and then suddenly your whole world is turned upside down. The moment the magic is released, Wellsie is also sealed off from the outside world and Sid, whose parents are out of town with her older sister, is alone. She doesn’t know where her brother is, she hasn’t spoken to her best friend in months, and her neighbor ends up getting eaten by a zombie that Sid subsequently traps in her basement. (Yes, there is a zombie component to the magic release.) When a classmate shows up days later, she is thrilled, but then she learns exactly what’s happening in Wellsie and finds out she has a lot more to be scared of than the murderous undead.
All credit to Wasley for packing so much into Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear! The plot zips along as Sid and her friends try to get to the very human bad guys who committed the murder that starts everything. (The motive here is no surprise: Someone terrible wants power.) In rapid order she finds out the secrets behind the Guardians, realizes the released magic means lots of regular folks, like Sid, are getting magical and discovers that no one is coming to save them. From the relatively mundane (someone’s out-of-control magic has left part of the town buried under snow), to the terrifying (lots of malevolent magic is in the hand of the villains), to the tragic (you can’t trust everyone), this group of teenagers finds themselves the only the ones capable of saving Wellsie. (The author explains the very good reason why they are the heroes.) But there’s no guarantee that anyone can save the town – and Sid, who misses her family, misses her friend, and has to deal with some truly serious hair issues (the levity that Wasley injects into the plot is critical to its success) does not know if she is up for the challenge.
Saving the world gets damn tiring, and Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear does a great job of realistically portraying all the exhaustion and pain and fear that the teens experience. The backstories for the individual characters like Sid, a Korean adoptee who is in a minority in the town, and Brian, who is fighting to maintain custody of his two younger sisters after the recent deaths of their parents, are compelling and utterly relatable. As they battle to seal the rift and save everyone that’s left (the zombies do exert some damage), the group discovers a lot about what matters and who they want to be. Call this one an adventure/horror/coming-of-age/thriller/mystery/romance that you will not be able to put down. Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear is pure delight, and Robin Wasley is the real deal. I look forward to more books from her.
This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.
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