Sundial

October 1, 2021

The multi-award-winning Ward returns with more psychological horror after September 2021's LJ-starred The Last House on Needless Street. Rob grew up at Sundial, her family's remote property in the Mojave Desert, with only research assistant and suspicious canines for companions. Now, with a husband, children, and a nice suburban home, she feels that she has finally escaped Sundial's creepy reach. Then a scary development proves her wrong. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 10, 2022
With this masterful horror novel, Ward (The Last House on Needless Street) weaves a seething, hallucinatory tale of family, death, and hereditary trauma that will keep readers guessing all the way to the devastating conclusion. Rob has spent years distancing herself from Sundial, her enigmatic childhood home nestled deep in the Mojave Desert, finding comfort and normalcy in playing the role of dutiful wife and mother of two. But when her haunted, volatile daughter, Callie, shows signs that she might be heir to the horrors that Rob has spent so long trying to escape, Rob and Callie must venture back into the Mojave to exorcise the ghosts of Rob’s past before they destroy her family’s future. Ward’s brilliance lies in how she explicates the innate bizarreness of a child’s experience of the world and explores the small cruelties that families are uniquely capable of visiting upon one another through intimacies accumulated and treated as ammunition. The queasy narrative gives its characters plenty of space to explore their unreal circumstances without ever sacrificing momentum, and while the ending skillfully ties together the many threads, it never offers easy answers. This is a must-read for fans of gothic literature and taut psychological thrillers.

January 1, 2022
"It's the chicken pox that makes me sure--my husband is having another affair." This ominous opening to Ward's latest (after The Last House on Needless Street, 2021) sets the tone for an original tale marked by constantly increasing tension. Not only does Rob have marital problems, but her older daughter, Callie, is an odd, solitary teen whose best friends are imaginary. As life starts to spin out of control, Rob takes Callie on a desperate road trip to visit Sundial, the research commune where Rob grew up and her personal horrors began. Told in alternating voices and time lines with Rob in present day, Rob as a teen, and Callie taking turns driving the story, Ward reveals details with restraint, keeping the reader hooked on every terrifying detail. With violence to animals, uncomfortable familial relationships, harsh landscapes, and compoundingly terrifying twists, Sundial will transfix readers until the final shocking conclusions. For fans of gut-wrenching psychological horror where bad things happen to flawed-but-sympathetic characters such as Violet, by Scott Thomas (2019), Baby Teeth, by Zoje Stage (2018), or The Cabin at the End of the World, by Paul Tremblay (2018).

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 17, 2021

When Rob finds animal parts hidden in her daughter Callie's room, she packs the girl up and takes her to Sundial, her family's remote, now uninhabited outpost in the Mojave Desert. Her father had kept Rob and her sister, Jack, sequestered at Sundial with no access to the outside world or people outside the family, other than the graduate students who came to aid him and his assistant/partner Mia with their experiments. The book shifts between the past, as Rob and Jack learn more about the work their father and Mia are doing, and the present day, as Rob tries to use her time alone with Callie to teach her about the darkness in their family's past. But the longer they stay in the desert, the more Rob comes to realize how unreliable her own version of her family history may be. Ward's (The Last House on Needless Street) latest gets off to a brisk start, slows down in the middle, and then races to the finish at such a breakneck speed that readers may struggle to absorb the full range of horrors Rob is recollecting. Note that many readers will be disturbed by scenes of experiments on animals. VERDICT On its own merits this would be an optional purchase, but since fans of the excellent Needless Street will drive demand, libraries should have it on the shelves.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.