Melissa, known as Mouse to family and friends, travels from Pittsburgh to North Carolina to clean out her deceased grandmother's house. Her grandmother had been prickly, unloving, and unfriendly, and moreover had been in a nursing home for a couple of years. Mouse hadn't visited in years, and her father, now hospitalized with his own health issues, didn't adequately warn her.
Mouse's grandmother was a hoarder.
While working through the trash on the first floor, she finds her step-grandfather's journal. Much of it seems not just odd, but potentially crazy, until she starts to encounter the frightening things he wrote about for herself. These include creatures constructed of bones, animal hides, and other random items.
Some of them seem to be stalking her.
And, out walking in the woods with her dog, Bongo, she finds herself on top a a hill that can't be there, and strangely carved, and strangely wrong, large stones. She can hardly get away from them fast enough.
At the same time, she's going into town regularly, where she meets sane, normal, friendly people, who are a touchstone for normality even as stranger and stranger things happen at the house and in its immediate area. She makes friends, including with her neighbors, at the small commune that were her grandmother's closest neighbors.
She's very grateful to have those friends when the bone creatures start actively hunting her.
Mouse, as well as Foxy, Tomas, Enid, and others in town are varied, interesting, complex, and likable characters. It matters to me that Mouse is a devoted, responsible dog owner, and yes, the dog survives! This is a frightening but absorbing, and satisfying, story.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
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