Ghost Mother

A woman comes to believe she’s encountering the spirits of a murdered family in Dwyer’s middling gothic debut. After abandoning a dead-end acting career, Lilly Bly has turned her ambitions to becoming a mother. When her husband, Jack, takes a job in the small town of Haven, Wis., Lilly becomes enamored with a dilapidated local mansion once owned by a famous circus family. She views the place as an ideal home for her and Jack’s future children. Though it’s well out of their price range—and Lilly has endured multiple miscarriages, with only grim news on the fertility front—the Blys buy the house, then learn it was the site of a grisly murder-suicide in 1955. As Jack grows distant and starts taking on more out-of-town work, Lilly becomes obsessed with the crime. Her grip on reality loosens as she starts to hear murmuring voices and mysterious knocks in the house, then imagines herself interacting with the late family in the days before their deaths. Soon, the lines between reality and fantasy blur, and Lilly becomes protective of the ghost of the dead family’s daughter, propelling the plot toward a shocking tragedy. Dwyer conjures a sufficiently creaky haunted-house atmosphere, but her narrative lacks tension, and readers are likely to tire of being inside Lilly’s head well before the climax. This disappoints. (Aug.)