The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste (2024, Saga Press, Simon and Schuster) was almost an instant buy for me. I chose this book entirely because of the summary. It did not hurt that it was written by a three-time Bram Stoker award winner and had a very cool cover. While I am not a fan of yellow, I appreciated how it has this yellow police tape feel without being actual police tape. You get a sense of being barred from seeing what the picture is of on account of the text. Or the yellow of the lines painted down the middle of a road. But the actual road is not quite there. After reading the novel, the cover takes on only a slightly deeper meaning, but it certainly caught my eye and played well with the summary.
While writing style never usually influences my choice of a book, I really do like a strong narrative so that’s what this is; it’s written in the first person present tense so nothing overly experimental or jarring. I find the first person present really works if you want to take somebody on a journey and that is exactly where we go back to Velkwood…
Why did I choose this book?
I chose this book entirely because of the summary. It did not hurt that it was written by a three-time Bram Stoker award winner and had a very cool cover. While I am not a fan of yellow, I appreciated how it has this yellow police tape feel without being actual police tape. You get a sense of being barred from seeing what the picture is of on account of the text. Or the yellow of the lines painted down the middle of a road. But the actual road is not quite there. After reading the novel, the cover takes on only a slightly deeper meaning, but it certainly caught my eye and played well with the summary.
While writing style never usually influences my choice of a book, I really do like a strong narrative so that’s what this is; it’s written in the first person present tense so nothing overly experimental or jarring. I find the first person present really works if you want to take somebody on a journey and that is exactly where we go back to Velkwood.
What is the plot?
A hometown haunt like no other. I can’t think of a read-alike for this book, and that is a good thing. It’s no wonder I want to tread it straight over again since there is nothing to follow it up with – it is a mood all of its own.
From the back cover:
“The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.
Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never settling anywhere or with anyone, feeling as trapped by her past as if she was still there in the small town she so desperately wanted to escape from. When a new researcher tracks her down and offers to pay her to come back to enter the vicinity, Talitha claims she’s just doing it for the money. Of all the crackpot theories over the years, no one has discovered what happened the night Talitha, her estranged, former best friend Brett, and Grace, escaped their homes twenty years ago. Will she finally get the answers she’s been looking for all these years, or is this just another dead end?”
The story begins with our main character On her front porch being propositioned by a paranormal researcher. and it carries on with the plot of not wanting to return to her haunted Hometown which is a street named after her, the Velkwood family. Maybe they just lived on the street for so long and it was called simply ‘Velkwood’. It was once technically a street or a lane or an avenue or something else but much like my childhood avenue everyone referred to it by its single name. After the paranormal researcher leaves, Talitha gets on the phone with Brett, another survivor – and we get the gist very quickly that they are indeed survivors – to talk about this paranormal researcher who they call Jack, the ‘cute one’.
Right off the bat we understand that there is a genuine sense of hesitation , fear and anxiety that is related to going home and unlike most small town horror novels we don’t get any explanation right away. Our explanations come in fits and starts as Talitha does inevitably return to Velkwood. Something terrible happened there obviously and something terrible continues to be happening 20 years later.
The Setting: It’s bigger on the inside…
The street, Velkwood, reminds me of so many other small town cul-de-sac neighbourhoods – even actual haunted anomalistic ones. Lincoln Way in Clairton used to be very similar sounding to Velkwood, and for a decade was a favourite of urban explorers and ghost hunters until it was torn down entirely. The entire town of Centralia suffered a similar fate with no paranormal leanings. Both actual real life abandoned neighbourhoods, and are also in Pennsylvania which I believe Velkwood would be in either Ohio or Pennsylvania both of which the author has called home. The setting reminds me very much of cookie cutter prefabricated areas where all the houses sort of look the same but then in amongst all that you find the one original road where the houses have been lived in by the same families for maybe two generations or three and the houses aren’t exactly like these prefab mid-2000s houses they’re all a little older because that street was from ‘before’; and that’s what this Velkwood area reminds me of. There’s little cul-de-sacs in between the new larger prefab subdivisions that come in between when there used to be a little breathing room in the suburbs. Those forgotten little corners, little cul-de-sac’s, little lanes and ways in between the larger more densely packed suburbia.
There is a looming sense of nostalgia without being spoon-fed. Nostalgia can be nauseating when it is part of this wave of ’80s nostalgia and this is like an 80s 90s Stories told by someone who really lived through the time is told not only in pop culture and media hits of the ’80s it’s told in how to create the hairstyles, the actual tools used in day-to-day life, the fabrics of the clothing that was worn and the state of things that you used to identify yourself and where you fit in thwart world; it’s those subtle hints of nostalgia that are so much more interesting than the wave of 80s pop culture that has rolled back lately. What is on the floor of a teenage girl’s bedroom in the ’80s? No mass media entertainment vehicle can really describe that the way this book did, and did that without seeming to try. Just the simple setup of the area itself, which is almost encased in a bubble of paranormal activity, with a dozen researchers hovering around it gives you the feeling of the house in ET. When the researchers descend it’s a terrifying horror moment in that film, and we live that for decades within The Hunting of Velkwood. That little tiny 3 minute party in ET that terrified me as a kid is what this entire book is. And on top of that we have a love story. Not a typical love story so it works well if you are not a romance fan, but the romance that exists within here. It is very relatable whether or not you have been in these situations. This isn’t something that I could literally relate to but it’s something that I think everyone can on some level of exploring adolescent love, the influence others have on that, being denied freedom at a young age; much more than being just about the one that got away. This touches on societal expectations posing actual barriers and ruining any chance you have at happiness. That is what the white picket fence on a friendly cul-de-sac represents to some people, oppression, and this story side-eyes that feeling from start to finish.
The Characters: Dead or alive?
Talitha Velkwood Is our main character And the main survivor of the Velkwood incident as we will call it I don’t want to spoil a thing in this is so I will not tell you who is alive and who is dead because there are dead people and you know they play a real part in the story whether or not we are introduced to them off the Hop. It becomes very apparent who is who and what role they play and where they are on the line in the sand that divides Velkwood in the history of Velkwood and the incident and the Velkwood vicinity which is the paranormal haunting for lack of a better term. There are some broad strokes for her character and I like that in a main character right not that you can impress yourself upon them or more easily live vicariously through them but you can more easily understand what they’re going through because so much of it is left to your imagination. What we made of Talitha is an exhausted and terrified individual and we’ve all been in that mood once or twice in our lives.
Sophie Velkwood is Talitha’s little sister and an adorable younger sibling. We don’t see a lot of her but she reminds me of one of those typical little sibling kids in a horror anime series that is always kind of whiny and kind of clingy and just all around adorable. It really works to impress upon the reader that someone so little and innocent shouldn’t be involved in something so terrifying and adult as the tragedy that is Velkwood.
Brett is Talitha’s best friend – or Talitha’s best friend – it’s really hard to draw that line with these two. The story progresses with them rekindling a friendship of some sort, accidentally or reluctantly, because of the paranormal researchers interest in the Velkwood Vicinity. The researchers had contacted Brett when Talitha does, she might just have to pay a visit.
Grace and Del are girlfriend and boyfriend. This is a friend group, right; You have Sophie and Brett, and Grace and Enid. Dell is sort of on the periphery as the boyfriend of Grace who is a very interesting character. I really love where they go with her after the incident. They’re all involved in the Velkwood incident but Grace’s reaction to it all is kind of off the wall but offers contrast to her friends. We have the strong one or the thoughtful one and the one who leaves, and then we have Grace; the reactionary. She has also had dealings with these paranormal researchers.
For all of Enid that I recall, if I recall correctly, she is fair-haired and pale and just plainly wallflower style pretty. The one that had an actually weird streak. We don’t again spend enough time with Enid but when you really think about it, their friend group sort of starts and stops on Enid.
Then we have Jack, the cute one as they call him. I don’t believe Jack has a last name but he’s the head paranormal researcher of this group that is living around the Velkwood Vicinity. If you can imagine a street that is abandoned that has a paranormal presence which ended as in a large national news incident at one point and now no one really dares go in it… or can’t go in it… or may not return from it… that’s not anywhere you want to live. There’s no proof that it’s not safe yet but it’s taken 20 years of people being uncomfortable living near Velkwood and a lot of the surrounding houses are abandoned so the researchers just live in them.
The Velkwood Vicinity Is a character of its own. Not a character in a Stephen King haunted house sort of way where the house itself breathes and lives and moves like a creature. It does have these symbiotic creatures in the faceless nameless researchers that cling on to its sides. A giant beached whale with things feeding off of it and eels like those the researchers and the vicinity itself are all one. They’re all sort of some sort of anomaly in and of themselves and together and I really think that’s a brilliant move where you want to breathe life into a setting. What better way to do that but then to have the residents around embody that personality. It’s really hard to distinguish where that sort of ravenous paranormal unexplainable voiceless, faceless entity begins and ends. Is it the surrounding people? Was it always the people? Is it the vicinity itself and the very ground? Really impossible to discern and a wonderful Journey trying to indirectly answer those questions.
Conclusion: This did haunt me
The moment I finished reading The Haunting of Velkwood, I wanted to start it over and read it again immediately. Several weeks later, I still feel that way. As noted previously I can’t think of any read-alikes that go along with this but it is a small town horror. It’s got that basic premise of something that has happened in your small town and you need to return and you don’t want to that I love so much. Every small town horror basically begins and ends like that and you go back and its terrible results. I’ve read some great small town horror recently like Ronald Malfi’s Small Town Horror and Withered and Grey Dog. All tiny town areas if not rural areas and one dips into folk horror, this one not so much. Velkwood is contemporary and modern paranormal. The closest thing in tone probably would be Devil’s Creek by Todd Keisling, another Pennsylvania author Those who have read this that I’ve heard talk about it feel the same way; it’s an impeccable book, a deep book and a quick read too; not too heavy and not overwritten in the slightest. If you are a big fan of small town horror and paranormal research in fiction, I highly recommend The Haunting of Velkwood and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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I talk horror books; extreme horror, classic, slasher, gothic, and everything in between. Helping you find the next best horror book to read is the goal, and sharing new and old horror from my shelves and new releases is how! Horror, nonfiction and even true crime can be found here as I find that human beings are the scariest thing of all.
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