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Felicia C. Sullivan is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here (Algonquin/Harper Perennial) and the founder of the now defunct but highly regarded literary journal Small Spiral Notebook. She maintains the popular lifestyle blog lovelifeeat.com. Born and raised in New York City, she now lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Follow Me into the Dark
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ISBN-13:
9781558614109
- Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY, The
- Publication date: 02/20/2017
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 320
- File size: 567 KB
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What happens when children are denied love and then left to their own devices? Follow Me into the Dark traces the unraveling of a family marred by perverse intergenerational abuse. Kate is a young baker whose mother is dying of cancer. Gillian is an oversexed, hyper-intellectual who looks like Kate and is sleeping with Kate’s stepfather. Jonah is Gillian’s odd but devoted stepbrother, who increasingly matches the description of the “Doll Collector,” a menacing serial killer. With Kate flailing in her mourning and beating back unwelcome memories, snippets of her family legacy are revealed just as the Doll Collector’s body count grows.
A complex, dark expression of the deprived heart and the desperate lengths children will go to in order to create family.
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Publishers Weekly
01/30/2017Sullivan’s debut novel (after her memoir, The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here) opens with a gripping scene in a hotel room where a woman’s hair is on fire. As Kate, the narrator of the first chapter, describes the incident, certain details become clear: Kate’s mother is dying of cancer; Gillian, the woman in the hotel room, has been sleeping with Kate’s stepfather; and Kate is the one who set Gillian’s hair on fire. Other details, however, remain hazy as a story of intergenerational pain, abuse, and mental illness unfurls. Truth becomes slippery as the narrative jumps in time and point of view, leaving as many questions as clues. Gillian has her own story of grief to share, and Jonah, Kate’s stepbrother, seems to match the profile of a local serial killer. It quickly becomes clear that many of the characters’ own accounts cannot be trusted, and reading becomes an exercise in fitting the pieces together. Many moments are engaging, but vagueness and withheld information obscure the more compelling human mysteries of the book. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"The raw terror of Sullivan’s novel lies in her depiction of family, of motherhood, not as safe haven but as private, internal danger. The horror comes from within, from inside the house, from inside the family, from inside the mind." — Los Angeles Review of Books "A searing portrayal of a woman's complicated grief. . . . An original, spellbinding, and horrifying read." — Kirkus (starred review)
"Sullivan’s haunting novel should have a strong appeal for fans of dark, psychological suspense." — Booklist
“Within the first words you'll find yourself pulled into something rich, luminous, and unsparing. I'm reminded of contemporaries like Merritt Tierce and Ottessa Moshfegh, but Felicia Sullivan achieves both an emotional intensity and pacing that is simultaneously seductive and blistering. Follow Me into the Dark is both an invitation and a dare. Accept both. You'll be glad you did.” —Joe McGinniss Jr., author of Carousel Court
“A haunting and wholly engrossing story of uncommon moral complexity, with prose bright and swift as lightning.” —Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“Precise and powerful, Felicia Sullivan’s gorgeous novel takes you on a journey through the darkest sides of human nature, with arresting images and unforgettable characters that don’t let go.” —Liza Monroy, author of Seeing As Your Shoes Are Soon To Be On Fire
"A gripping exploration of pain, anger and revenge. It will stay with you long past the last page." —Kelly Braffet, author of Save Yourself
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-12-27A searing portrayal of a woman's complicated grief.Sullivan's (The Sky Isn't Visible from Here: A Memoir, 2009) first novel is not a straightforward saga about how pain is passed down through generations. Rather, it traces the effects of death by suicide and murder using nonlinear vignettes that dip in and out of three decades, from the late 1960s to the present day. The plot is delivered in poetic fragments and dialogue. We first meet Kate, a baker who's consumed by rage at a teenager, Gillian, who's sleeping with her stepfather, James, while her mother, Ellie, is dying of lung cancer. Kate's rage doesn't subside when Ellie commits suicide; it only grows. Rage, it seems, is not a new emotion for Kate but one that has been festering inside her for a long time: "the precision of baking cakes comforts me. Right now I need to follow an outline. I need to color in the lines. This is how I get through my days without screaming. At night, I bite into my pillows and swallow some of the feathers." Kate and Gillian are doppelgängers in a terrible way; after she watches news about a serial killer, Kate realizes "all the victims resemble that woman. Gillian. And since I look just like her, someone out there is killing versions of me." In early foreshadowing, Gillian tells her stepbrother, Jonah, "I want to be a person who turns over leaves," only for him to reply, "News flash: leaves look the same on both sides." This is an exploration of violence and the lengths one will go to to fulfill desires too dangerous and abnormal to be spoken of except to others who share them. It's also a novel that shows how habits leap from one generation to the next and untreated mental illness morphs into something profoundly damaging. An original, spellbinding, and horrifying read.