Gothictown by Emily Carpenter

 

It just so happens this was the first book I bought on the 2025 Greater Charlotte Book Crawl, on April 1, at an event for Emily Carpenter!  Gothictown was originally described to me as horror, which is not really my jam.  But, I admire authors so much for their work, dedication, revision acceptance, and research that I will go to any Author Event I can!  I even asked the question during the Q&A if this was really True Horror like the King, Stephen.  I was assured it was more creepy than anything, and that was true.  Like chills up your spine trying to figure out how Billie was going to get out of this mess!!

Here's the gist:  a young couple and their 6 year old daughter take an offer to move from NYC to small town Georgia, where for $100 they can buy a house if they will set up business in this dying town.  (Hint - that is foreshadowing!!!)  This small town named Juliana, after the founder's daughter who died young, is a close knit community who seem to barter many services, never go on vacation, and are dedicated to Juliana.  Like, really dedicated. 

So, Billie and Peter move into the big mansion, and things get weird.  They can't sleep, there are nightmares, nothing seems to get done.  Billie opens her restaurant (which was another draw for me - scary story about a restaurant owner!  HAHAHA!  Welcome to my life!) and gets some intense attention from her business neighbor.  (In her Author's notes, Carpenter admits she did not spend much focus on how hard it is to open and run a restaurant; she worked in one for a while before writing this so she knew of what she spoke.  That part of the novel is 100% fantasy haha!!!)

Yeah, things go downhill from there.  Billie is a great strong female protagonist, and her daughter is adorable and perceptive.  The town Elders are the creeptastic ones, and that is a good word to describe this story.  I could not put it down.  It just kept rolling faster and faster and faster and I thought to myself that the writing actually got better and better and better as it went on; not that it was bad at first but the story just rolled!!!

The moral of the story is:  don't always believe what they tell you about a book.  Or a $100 mansion, either.