Author: Rachel Harrison
Publisher: Audible/Berkeley
Page Count: 304 Pages / 9 Hours, 34 Minutes
Publication Date/Year: 2020
Narrator: Sara Scott
Genre: Horror
Rachel Harrison’s debut novel, The Return, has been on my radar, probably since it published a couple of years ago. Three friends are surprised when their friend, Julie, disappears. Julie went hiking and never returned. Many people think she’s dead, but not Elise. Elise assumes Julie will return. She goes through the motions of attending the funeral (which happens a year after Julie disappears), but she also loses touch with Mae and Molly. Until Julie does return exactly two years after she vanished, Julie’s friends, Elise, Molly, and Mae, organize a weekend getaway at the Red Honey Inn, an exclusive, new, themed hotel in upstate New York. Julie is the last to arrive and this weekend is her friends to see her. Julie is much thinner, she looks sickly, a pale imitation of her former self. Julie is also acting strangely, for example, she now eats meat. Before she disappeared, she was a vegetarian. There are only occasional flashes of Julie’s former self.
Harrison frames her story through the voice of Elise, who as I suggested above, was the least concerned of her three “living” friends about Julie’s fate largely because she was closer to Julie than her other friends. Elise is a loner, somewhat self-imposed, compared to Mae and Molly. It was pretty easy to identify with Elise for me, Harrison did a nice job of making her situation grounded. For example, I thought it was a very nice touch that Elise expressed concern over the weekend getaway. First she thought it might be too much too soon, but second, and what gave the story that much more of a genuine feel is that Elise was concerned with the cost of going away to a fancy hotel. A seemingly small detail like that goes a long way to allowing the reader to “buy in” to what is happening in the story. Of course, with Elise as the narrator of the story, we only get her opinions on her friends and the situation.
Elise’s trepidation is a hint of the unsettling nature of the story that will unfold. A sense of dread slowly creeps into the story. The hotel is eerie, for starters. While it isn’t as haunted as say, the Overlook, it does give off a vibe of not quite being normal. The mountain setting doesn’t help, either. The limited number of staff, as Elise relays to us, come across as almost too perky. Each of the four characters is in their own themed room, each room feels like it could be in a Tim Burton movie.
As I said, the three friends realize Julie is very different. There’s an odor about her, Julie’s teeth are falling out, and she only seems to have an appetite for raw meat and alcohol. Elise soon thinks she’s seeing shadows moving, adding to her unease and an overall sense of being haunted. Julie’s presence continues to unnerve the three friends, with Mae and Molly urging Elise confront Julie about her memories and her appearance.
I don’t want to go too much further with plot details, but suffice it to say, Harrison does a fantastic job with an unsettling narrative. The creep factor increases as the novel heads to its inevitable conclusion, with some of the elements being explained, others not so much.
At times, Elise explained things that didn’t require explaining. But in the little moments, the intricacies of the friendship of these four women, Harrison excels. As I said, sometimes the smaller “devil in the detail” elements can pay it forward for the larger narrative. Overall, Harrison manages to infuse her narrative with a very strong pull that was difficult to deny.
An impressive horror debut. I’ve seen this novel labeled as a feminist horror and I suppose with the majority of characters being women (Tristan, Julie’s husband is the lone significant male character) I suppose that could be true. What The Return wound up being for me was a gripping, horror novel that was told with well-measured reveals. I guess I’d say folks who enjoyed the film The Descent would likely find a lot to like in this novel.
Highly Recommended
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