Nicholas Litchfield

Lancashire Post book review by Nicholas Litchfield: A TEENAGE girl’s disappearance on a rain-soaked Oregon highway casts a long shadow over Salt Point, a coastal town where secrets cling as tightly as the fog.

Keith Rosson – a Shirley Jackson Award-winner who has garnered widespread acclaim for his genre-defying fiction from the likes of Stephen King – plunges readers into a world where the boundary between the living and the dead often vanishes in his electrifying new novel Crone. Released next month, the story blends rural noir and supernatural horror, and is rooted in the isolation and decay of a town marked by grief and addiction.

Set in the fictional town of Salt Point, Crone opens with fifteen-year-old Hannah Lamp and her best friend, Avery Bryant, caught in a torrential rainstorm as they walk home at night after a party. Nearly blind from birth, Hannah is fiercely independent but isolated, her mother gone and her father troubled. Exhausted and frustrated by her limited vision, Hannah insists they accept a ride from a blue van. Avery is wary, but ultimately Hannah approaches the van alone and vanishes, leaving Avery burdened by guilt.