Jess Lourey’s stunning suspense novel UNSPEAKABLE THINGS falls into the latter camp. Inspired by a true story from the author’s hometown, UNSPEAKABLE THINGS explores exactly what its title suggests: the unspeakable horrors of a small town with unthinkable secrets. Something is rotten in the town of Lilydale, Minnesota.
The lonely-scream smell of that dirt basement lived inside me. Mostly it kept to a shadow corner of my brain, but the second I’d think Lilydale, it’d scuttle over and smother me. The smell was a predatory cave stink, the suffocating funk of a great somnolent monster that was all mouth and hunger. It had canning jars for teeth, a single string hanging off a light bulb its uvula. It waited placidly, eternally, for country kids to stumble down its backbone stairs. It let us swing blindly for that uvula string.
Our fingers would brush against it. The relief was candy and sun and silver dollars and the last good thing we felt before the beast swallowed us whole, digesting us for a thousand years.
