Review | Dead Voices by Katherine Arden

Grab your blankets and flashlights, kids, because this is one super creepy book.

After surviving evil scarecrows in Small Spaces, Ollie and her friends think that life has returned to normal. None of them expect their winter ski vacation to be derailed by ghosts … and things only get worse when the Smiling Man arrives on the scene.

(I’m so happy to have read this on an airplane at 30,000 feet … because reading it alone in my apartment — the sun setting at 4PM, the snow falling outside — would not have ended well.)

I requested this book immediately after finishing Small Spaces, and was so excited when it became available. Ollie’s first adventure was creepy and atmospheric, and I loved how Arden subtly introduced themes of grief, loss, healing, and friendship.

Dead Voices didn’t disappoint. This was a fun — and also very creepy and atmospheric — novel, bursting with ghosts, lore, and things that go bump in the night. It gently introduces the idea that people are more complex than they appear: Brian, the sensitive jock and book-lover; Coco, the pink-haired “ditz” who’s also brave, loyal, a non-fiction reader, and a chess protégé. Ideas that are echoed in the ghosts and lodge.

Similar to Small Spaces, the book was slow to start and develop: the central conflict didn’t truly emerge until after the half-way point. Plus side: we really get to know the settings and characters. Down side: you’re left itching for the action.

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Things I liked:

Ollie’s dad. Please. Send a guy like this my way.

The ghost story. Oh, my. This a true, classic-horror-movie sort of ghost story. Ultra spooky, with many classic horror tropes. And yet, somehow, Arden makes everything feel perfectly unique.

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Things I disliked:

The ski lodge. Perhaps I’m just used to large commercial resorts, but the way the ski hill was described — as this cute lil’ ma and pop lodge — didn’t seem very realistic. Chairlifts and runs are really expensive.

The shifting perspectives. Whereas Small Spaces was told from Ollie’s perspective, Dead Voices shifts between Ollie and Coco. As I was listening to the audiobook, I found the jumps between perspectives rather jarring and without warning, which took away from the reading experience. Plus: I’m here for Ollie.

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Favourite quote:

I believe in memory. I believe in remembering someone you love so well that it becomes kind of like a ghost. You remember someone so hard that it feels like they’re in the next room, just around the corner, that they could walk in any minute.

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The Details:

• The Book: Dead Voices by Katherine Arden
• Published: 2019, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers
• My Copy: VIRL
• Read date: January 2-6, 2020
• Rating/5: 👻👻👻
• You should read this if you like … ghost stories on cold winter nights … and not of A Christmas Carol variety
• Avoid this if you … often experience nightmares of being trapped in an alternate mirror reality