Publishers Weekly
★ 12/14/2015
Brundage’s (bestselling author of The Doctor’s Wife) searing, intricate novel epitomizes the best of the literary thriller, marrying gripping drama with impeccably crafted prose, characterizations, and imagery. In 1978, Ella and Calvin Hale respond to their farm’s failing fortunes by committing suicide. As their sons, Eddy, Cole, and Wade, are taken in by nearby relatives, their farmhouse in upstate Chosen, N.Y., is bought by outsiders. College professor George Clare, his beautiful wife, Catherine, and their toddler, Franny, buy the house and seem picture-perfect, but appearances deceive. George, an expert in Hudson River painter George Inness (an actual figure, whose artistic theories and Swedenborg-influenced philosophy run through the novel) is a dark soul with a young mistress and a violent history; insecure Catherine takes his abuse until the women’s movement helps empower her to leave him. Then George appears at a neighbor’s door, announcing that he has found Catherine murdered in their bedroom. Though locals blame him, the crime remains unsolved. Seen as cursed and haunted by its dark history, their house sits abandoned until 2004, when Franny, now a surgical resident, re-encounters painful memories and her former babysitter Cole Hale on a trip to empty it. Moving fluidly between viewpoints and time periods, Brundage’s complex narrative requires and rewards close attention. Succeeding as murder mystery, ghost tale, family drama, and love story, her novel is both tragic and transcendent. Agent: Linda Chester, Linda Chester Literary Agency. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Brundage’s searing, intricate novel epitomizes the best of the literary thriller, marrying gripping drama with impeccably crafted prose, characterizations, and imagery. . . . Moving fluidly between viewpoints and time periods, Brundage’s complex narrative requires and rewards close attention. Succeeding as murder mystery, ghost tale, family drama, and love story, her novel is both tragic and transcendent.” —Publishers Weekly [boxed review]
“All Things Cease to Appear is a riveting ghost story, psychological thriller, and literary page turner. It’s also the story of four women: Ella, Catherine, Justine, and Willis. With masterful skill and brilliant empathy, Brundage brings each of them to vivid and remarkable life. At its heart, this is a story about women’s grit and courage, will and intelligence. It’s a powerful and beautiful novel.” —Kate Christensen
“At once high art and a spellbinding thriller, this is a book of many wonders, including a character as creepily sinister as any created by Patricia Highsmith.” —Beverly Lowry
“Brundage’s brilliant new novel is as terrifyingly unsettling—and as beautiful—as cracking ice over a raging river. Part murder mystery, part ghost story, it’s also a profound look at how past guilt informs the present, how what we yearn for is not always what we get, and how it’s not only houses that can be haunted, but people as well. One of the most ambitious, original and gorgeously written novels that I’ve ever read—and been unable to forget.” —Caroline Leavitt
“A dynamic portrait of a young woman coming into her own [and] of a marriage in free fall. . . . It rises to [great] literary heights and promises a soaring mix of mysticism.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A classic murder mystery [combined] with a gripping psychological thriller, exploring the complexities of grief, relationships—romantic, familial and friendly—and small-town life.” —Haley Herfurth, BookPage
“I bloody loved this. I could have taken weeks over it, lingering on the harmony and beauty of her language and the creeping delicacy of what was going on - but the plot and the people pull you in. It’s an iceberg in disguise. Beneath the daisies and farmhouses, the drinks parties and local dramas something grand, tense and terrifying is shifting, between men and women, between townies and newcomers, between adults and children. And then a crack shoots through - unexpected light, the clarity of hatred, inevitability...” —Louisa Young
Library Journal
★ 03/01/2016
Art history professor George Clare comes home to his upstate New York farmhouse to find Catherine, his wife, murdered and their toddler daughter alone in her room. Instead of the traditional whodunit path, however, Brundage takes the reader back in time to reveal what led to this devastating event. It's not just a history of the Clares and their move from Manhattan to a depressed rural town; it's about their neighbors, George's free-spirited colleagues, and the boys who perform odd jobs around the property. Each person connected to the family has their own story and perspective, and the author elegantly shifts among them all until the truth comes into focus. In examining the inconsistency of memory, Brundage plays with how things look vs. how things actually are. The structure of her transcendent work allows readers to see how characters experience events in the moment, reflect upon them later, and then examine them years after the fact. VERDICT Tragedy leaves an indelible mark on both people and places in Brundage's (A Stranger Like You) piercing new novel. Part mystery, part ghost story, and entirely brilliant, this title will entrance book clubs and literary fiction readers.—Liza Oldham, Beverly, MA
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-12-23
You get in your car, drive to work, park, and go inside. An ordinary day—except, back at home, someone is chopping your wife to bits, the opening gambit in Brundage's (A Stranger Like You, 2010, etc.) smart, atmospheric thriller. Here's the thing about creepy old farmhouses: they're full of ghosts, and ax murderers lurk in the tree line. Art history professor George Clare is a rational fellow, but when he moves into the country to teach at a small-town college, he finds his colleagues making odd assumptions: since he knows a thing or two about Swedenborg, then he must be game for a séance. Catherine, his young wife, whose "beauty did not go unnoticed" even out among the yokels, has long since sunk into a quiet depression. They have problems. She doesn't live long enough to grow to hate the country, though she senses early on that the place they've bought from a foreclosed-on local family is fraught with supernatural danger: "Until this house," she thinks, "she'd never thought seriously of ghosts, at all. Yet, as the days passed, their existence wasn't even a question anymore—she just knew." Yup. Question is, who would do her in, leaving a single grim witness, the terrified daughter? There's no shortage of suspects on the mortal plane, to say nothing of the supernatural. Part procedural, part horror story, part character study, Brundage's literate yarn is full of telling moments: George is like a "tedious splinter" in Catherine's mind, while George dismisses her concerns that maybe they shouldn't be living in a place where horrible things have happened with, "As usual, you're overreacting." But more, and better, Brundage carries the arc of her story into the future, where the children of the nightmare, scarred by poverty, worry, meth, Iraq, are bound up in its consequences, the weight of all those ghosts, whether real or imagined, upon them forever. With a storyline that tightens like a constrictor, this is a book that you won't want to read alone late at night.
