HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO TO HELP A STRANGER?
While driving through the mountains of West Virginia during a late-night snowstorm, a recently divorced woman experiences bizarre electrical problems, leaving her with little choice but to place her trust with a charismatic truck driver. But when an unexplainable creature with haunting red eyes gets between them, she is forced to make one of the toughest decisions of her life. Will she abandon the stranger who kept her safe—or will she climb down below, where reality has shapeshifted into a living nightmare?

I picked up Below because I’d been blown away by the power of Laurel Hightower’s novella Crossroads about grief and sacrifice and despair and hope and what happens when they all become focused on the loss of a child.

Below is a very different kind of story but it hit me just as hard. It’s a disturbing, creature-feature, lone-woman-in-danger, action-packed story that became more and more unsettling as I settled into the situation and our heroine started to reveal who she was.

Part of what made the story unsettling for me was that it refused to follow a well-worn genre path. This is part horror, part science fiction, part thriller and all strange. I liked that not all of the strangeness was explained. How can you explain the truly strange anyway?

The pace of the story kept accelerating but it didn’t rush along in a straight line to an inevitable conclusion. Instead, I had to keep reassessing what was really happening and why. Like Addy, our heroine, every time I thought I knew what was going on, it turned out that something different and worse was coming my way.

The story starts with a fast pace and a tight focus that never lets up. We begin with a simple statement, part shock, part fear, part denial, part apology: It came out of nowhere and not a pause for breath after that. The statement is made by Addy, a lone woman in an almost deserted truckstop at night, on a remote mountain road in winter with a storm coming on. She’d be driving when suddenly, it came out of nowhere and changed her life. Now she’s holding a coffee cup in her shaking hands and she’s about to change the life of a trucker, the only other customer in the truckstop.

It takes a while to discover what it really was that came out of nowhere and who it came for and why, but even in that first scene, even before the darkness and the pain and the fear, it was clear that it would come again and that things were going to get worse.

What I liked most about the story was that, without slowing the pace of loosening the focus, this thriller became focused on the heroine as much as the plot. Addy is not the typical heroine. She’s a recently divorced woman whose confidence has been maimed by the years that she’s spent with her overbearing husband. She was doing something daring for the first time in years, driving through the night to meet friends and then it came out of nowhere nowhere. Addy isn’t a superhero, She has no special powers or expertise that will be revealed in extremis. She’s a woman who has only just begun to rediscover her confidence in herself and who is about to be plunged into an ordeal that she may not survive. As the story rushes forward, Addy’s personality is revealed along the way by every reaction she has and every choice she makes. By the end, I understood her better than I understood what had happened to her. I’m pretty sure she felt the same way.

I’ve been impressed by what I’ve seen from Laurel Hightower so far. I’m now looking forward to reading her debut book, Whispers In The Dark.