Sleeping Celeste

This was a gripping gothic tale of loss, despair, and denial.

The crafting of the main character’s heartbreak into a blinkered, macabre obsession with her dead daughter is absolutely devesting and I loved the way the author painted a picture of the coffin, which gave the mother a window into her daughter’s corpse and fed that obsession rather than brought any kind of comfort.

The escalation from inconsolable grief to near-necromancy recalls the gothic horror of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary and the author expertly mixed this influence with a dash of Edgar Allen Poe to craft a tragic mother who… show more.