An Evil Premise

Vandelly (Theme Music) crafts a sinuous thriller whose protagonist is bedeviled—literally—by the horror novel she’s trying to write. For years, self-published author Jewel Maxwell has labored in the shadow of her more successful sister, Deidre Baldwin, a bestselling fantasy writer. When Jewel rushes to her comatose sister’s side in Virginia following a near-fatal hit-and-run, she stumbles on the opportunity of a lifetime: Deidre’s latest manuscript is up against her publisher’s deadline, and her agent is desperate to have someone finish it. Jewel takes on the job, but soon has reservations: Deidre’s novel, a horror potboiler with the working title Unspeakable Demons, appears to have a life of its own, self-generating paragraphs of text when Jewel isn’t looking and infecting her with the impulse to commit the bloody atrocities that fill its pages. Jewel’s conclusion—that the muse driving the novel’s creation is a demon determined to infect not only its author but anyone who reads it—traps her in a moral dilemma. Though Jewel’s travails become repetitive as the story progresses, they set the stage for a twist ending that will leave readers who’ve locked into her narrative pleasantly surprised. The result is sure to entertain anyone who has pondered the imaginative impact of reading horror fiction. (Aug.)