I live in Iowa. I’ve lived in Iowa for 23 years. Darnielle masterfully detailed the general solitude and simultaneous small-town gossipy energy of low population Midwest towns. The soft, eerie quiet of driving through tiny, rural strip mall streets and then the shriek of wind blowing through cornfields as you push 70 down I-35. Everything was there. Everything was perfectly intact and in place and the malaise and the grief and thirst of exploration but the settling for okay. What an enchanting read. Until…what?

What is this book about? I get the big picture. I understand the nitty gritty. I feel the characters. A few meandering plot lines that are maybe supposed to snake together to completion in the end, but don’t? Not really, at least.

It’s so hard to describe a book that I really truly loved, and was so well written, and was so unsettling and suspenseful. But at the same time, I’m left so unfulfilled, so frustrated.

This book is going to get picked up by A24 in a few years and turned into some art house horror movie and I’m going to like it, obviously, but I won’t understand it, still.