Soon

August 15, 2019
A tiny Australian town is beset by a nightly horror-filled mist in Murphy's debut. The town of Nebulah was a small but bustling town until nine months ago, on the winter solstice, when the mist appeared. Now the population has dwindled to six, the last remaining stragglers who have nowhere to go coming together in the evenings to keep each other safe. Pete was once a police officer and relies on that experience to help keep everyone together and in contact with the nearest town as his group slowly whittles itself to nothing. When a young girl and self-proclaimed psychic shows up at his door one night, sheltering with him from the storm of nightmares outside, she implores him to leave town before the coming solstice, or it will be the end. Her words ring in his ears as he spends the coming months trying to figure out how to convince the last remaining townspeople to leave with him. With a similar energy and frantic dread as that found in Josh Malerman's Bird Box, Murphy has constructed a world in which the idea of a town plagued by an actual calamity that is somehow ignored by the outside world is completely believable. To complicate the question of why the residents don't just leave, Murphy subtly builds a secondary monster in the state benefits system that traps these lower-income townspeople in place without the money to rescue themselves. The juxtaposition of the legitimate terror in the town and the residents' cool treatment from the rest of the country, emphasized by a scene of Pete visiting his estranged daughter, only adds to the uneasiness of the book. The seductive monsters are almost more inviting than the outside world. A solid new entry into the horror scene filled with anxiety and dread.

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August 26, 2019
The residents of a tiny, isolated town in the Australian outback are haunted by a malevolent force in this wonderfully taut novel, which is laced from start to finish with creeping dread. Every evening as the sun sets, the streets of Nebulah fill with a strange mist that swirls with terrible visions of the dead and dying. Only locked doors and windows keep the mist at bay until dawn comes—and those who linger outside are murdered, their bodies never found, their forms added to the specters in the mist come dark the next day. Aging former cop Pete is one of the last stubborn holdouts in what has become a ghost town, with most residents either disappeared into the mist or fled to safer climes. Despite strict habits of vigilance—being indoors by dark, locking doors and windows, and clustering together at night—the survivors’ numbers are rapidly whittled down by suicide, surrender, and slip-ups until only Pete and his closest friend, retired schoolteacher Milly, remain. Murphy deploys sharp, fluent prose and a skillful command of atmospheric terror to tell a story that gets at the heart of real horror: the very human emotions of regret, loneliness, despair, yearning for home, and having nowhere to go. Readers who appreciate subtle horror grounded in human failings will appreciate the buildup and maintenance of tension through this book, as well as the fateful ending, which successfully drives home that same vulnerable humanity.

September 15, 2019
Murphy's striking debut explores the effects of leaving your home behind. Pete's hometown of Nebulah was once a thriving small town, but now it is a desolate, and frightening place to be. After the sun goes down, a dangerous mist flows in, making anyone caught in it disappear. There is a sense of creeping dread as the novel progresses, particularly after Pete meets Alex, a woman with psychic powers who warns him that he must leave town or face horrible things, including the possibility of death. Pete's character is hard to identify with at times?he is deeply flawed and apathetic, but he eventually faces his demons. Though it may be too timid for some horror readers, Soon will appeal to Stephen King fans thanks to the picture Murphy paints of a small town left behind to rot in isolation. Readers will be glued to their seats, turning pages until the novel's shocking and yet somehow expected conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

July 27, 2017
Five four-wheel drives with tinted windows roll slowly, mysteriously, through a small Australian town during a winter solstice. Their purpose is unknown, their arrival an ominous portent. When they depart, just as inexplicably, the birds disappear and a malevolent evening mist descends on the town each night. A handful of locals, led by ex-policeman Pete, either can’t or won’t leave the only place they call home, and so they stay to face the mist. Loosely based on the true story of the asbestos town, Wittenoom, and written with a poet’s instinct for language, Lois Murphy has created a unique, haunting and atmospheric tale in her debut novel. The ‘soon’ of the title sets the tone of the book, and each page drips with foreboding. Her characters are the kinds of people you might meet in any small Australian town: battling to survive and wilful in the face of change, as their home becomes a ghost town. While Soon draws on genre tropes (from crime and horror in particular), the story focuses on the human relationships in the face of adversity rather than the strange happenings themselves. It will appeal to readers who like their literary fiction with a dash of the mysterious and strange. Deborah Crabtree is a Melbourne-based writer and bookseller