Behind The Red Door by Megan Collins

Comes out today! Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the advance digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

Behind the Red Door starts with social worker Fern who is planning to return home to help her neglectful father pack up his home to move to Florida. Ted, her father, is a now retired university professor, obsessed with fear, who created various "Experiments" which were really more like pranks on Fern as a child to document her fear and response in the name of science. Not a great parent, to say the least. Fern has accepted his limitations (and those of her mom as well, who's off on a cruise somewhere, always having been emotionally detached from Fern), and has come to help because her father expressed that he needed her, which was basically like emotional catnip.

Fern's been dealing with some reactions to some new medication her psychiatrist has prescribed, and as she's making the journey back to her hometown, we get the sense that maybe she's not doing so well. She's experiencing hallucinations and nightmares which are hinting that there may be some repressed memories coming up for Fern that finally need dealing with.

Simultaneously, Fern's become aware of a woman called Astrid Sullivan who went missing from a neighbouring town 20 years ago because she's just gone missing again. After her initial abduction she was eventually returned, drugged to a street corner near her house, without any explanation. Now, 20 years later, after having published her own memoir of the harrowing experience of being locked in a basement for days, Astrid has disappeared again without a trace, this time from her home in Maine. Fern starts reading the memoir, and Astrid is convinced that there was someone who saw who her captor was back then, and that this person knows something but has never come forward. Could Fern's nightmares hold the key to who this witness might have been?

This book had great pacing— it didn't drag at any point, and it also didn't feel like the story was too rushed, either. I will say that at times, the beginning felt a little slapdash in some ways: as if the middle and end had been fleshed out first, leaving the beginning without quite as much attention as it may have benefitted from. Having said that, I thought it was a solid story overall. 3.5 stars.

You can pick up your copy here.

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