The Clackity

The Clackity
by Lora Senf
Recommended Ages: 11+

Evie lives with her Aunt Desdemona, a paranormal expert, in the seventh most haunted town in America (per capita). She isn't afraid of ghosts, which is lucky, because she also suffers from panic attacks and although her parents disappeared in a house fire, she refuses to accept that they're dead. To make sure her aunt doesn't disappear on her, she keeps close tabs on her whereabouts. One of the few things she is strictly forbidden to do is go to the abandoned abattoir (fancy talk for slaughterhouse) on the outskirts of Blight Harbor. But she breaks that rule the day her snooping reveals that Des has gone to the abattoir, a chilling place that stinks of wrongness. And she goes back the next day when Des disappears, leaving he car parked outside the sinister building.

Evie follows Des's footsteps into the abattoir and meets a horrible creature that calls itself the Clackity. The Clackity strikes a deal with her, promising Evie that she can get her aunt back if she travels into (what I take to be) the land of the dead, at the end of a passage inside the abattoir, and visits seven houses there. And whoops, I haven't even mentioned Jonathan Jeffrey Pope, a serial killer whose ghost has been conspicuously absent from Blight Harbor's famous hauntings. He's been saving up his evil for something special. And now he'll be at Evie's heels while she travels through seven roughly house-shaped nightmarescapes, facing her most bloodcurdling fears. Above all is her fear of losing Des, so she's in a race against Pope, really – and when he's not breathing down her neck, the Clackity is meddling in her adventure in his own uniquely horrible way. Perhaps the worst part of it is the thought, which Evie keeps pushing aside, of what will happen when she finally brings Pope and the Clackity together.

Apparently based in part on a visit to a real-life abattoir, this book is sure to send shivers down the young spines of ghost story fans. It's really too disturbing to be left to kids alone; adults just have to experience its exquisite creepy-crawlies as well. A couple of the houses in the Clackity's netherworld wouldn't be too bad, if it weren't for Pope's ghost in cold pursuit. But no nightmare is left untouched, from doors that disappear after closing behind you and landscapes that seem to stretch onward forever, to plunges into a bottomless pit and encounters with child-eating witches. These are only the lighter removes in a multi-course feast of fear, headlined by two grotesquely evil spirits, testing the courage of a vulnerable girl.

I am totally slapping this book with an Occult Content Advisory, which concerned parents can take for what it's worth. Despite their Grimm Bros. trappings and appetite for children, some of the witches in this story are depicted sympathetically enough to suggest a more than fairy-tale witchcraft. But not all the magic in this book is of the dark kind – for example, the unexplainable shadow of a sparrow that perches on Evie's skin like a living, moving tattoo, and whose encouragement keeps her going through some super-dark places. And if you can stomach the sometimes paralyzing, suffocating fear that her adventure puts Evie through, you may be the type of horror maven this book was made for.

This is Washington state-based Lora Senf's debut novel and the first book in the Blight Harbor trilogy. The second book, The Nighthouse Keeper, is set for release on Oct. 17, 2023.