The Darkness Surrounds Us

July 31, 2023
Lukasik (White Like Her) delivers a gripping ghost story of pandemics past in this well-crafted gothic mystery. During the 1918 flu epidemic, nurse Nellie Lester leaves her work in a Chicago contagion ward to care for the wife of a logger baron in a mansion on a Lake Michigan island that—based on an old photograph—she suspects may harbor secrets her late mother kept from her, including her father’s identity. Once there, Nellie is haunted by frequent visions of her mother’s ghost in the small turret bedroom she stays in, while the library offers hints that her parents were part of the mysterious community that built up and then abruptly abandoned the island two decades earlier. When the body of the mansion’s previous nurse turns up in the woods, Nellie attempts to investigate her death, but locals become increasingly angry about a stranger poking her nose into their business. Readers will sympathize with Nellie’s fears and frustrations, and Lukasik maintains a deliciously dark tension throughout. With unpredictable plotting and superior atmospherics, this is an early-autumn treat fit for late-night devouring.

June 10, 2024

Returning to fiction, Lukasik (White Like Her: My Family's Story of Race and Racial Passing) sets her latest novel on a remote island in Lake Michigan. Nellie Lester is fleeing Chicago amid the devastation of the 1918 influenza epidemic, so she takes a job on the island to care for a lumber baron's wife and newborn child. The previous nurse quit and fled the island, or so it was thought, until her perfectly preserved body appears. Nellie's move is not purely motivated by escaping influenza. Nellie's earliest years were spent on this same island as a member of a doomsday cult; she is now hoping to find answers about her shadowed past. Rachel L. Jacobs has several AudioFile Earphones Awards to her credit, and her presentation here proves that she knows her way around a mystery. She perfectly captures the full range of unsettling gothic tropes but seamlessly switches to a reassuring tone when Nellie's ghostly mother enters the scene. Additionally, Jacobs provides well-rounded characterizations for the island's residents and the lumber workers who complicate Nellie's desperate search for answers. VERDICT This atmospheric, evocatively narrated audio will captivate fans of gothic mysteries in the vein of Rhiannon Ward's The Quickening.--Laura Trombley

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