Alright, this was some seriously creepy stuff, and I’m always in for a catastrophe that isn’t quite clearly explained. Like you are only getting bits and pieces and nobody is ever going to actually lay it out for you. Draw your own conclusions. But that being said, I did have one caveat regarding it all. But more about that later.
Amanda and Clay, along with their two adolescent children, are renting a vacation home for a few weeks in a thickly wooded area of Long Island. They find the house, a lovely posh place, and start unpacking. There doesn’t seem to be any phone service out here, and the internet is down, but that’s a problem for later. And then there’s a knock on the door.
Surprise! It’s the actual owners of the home, Ruth and G. H., an older couple, and the actual owners of the home. (But since they are black, there is a certain amount of skepticism for a bit, but they do seem to know the house like the back of their hand.) They are very apologetic about the whole thing, but it seems as the city is having some sort of extreme blackout, and Ruth just really wanted to wait it out in her own home. They offer to refund Amanda and Clay’s rental fees, but no one’s eager to return to the city as long as the blackout is going on, and at least they have power and water here, and the food’s not going to run out any time some, so. . . . If only there was a way to get some news, but that’s going to involve running down to the nearest town.
Meanwhile information is filtering in to the reader (but not our protagonists) that there is seriously Something Going Wrong out there, and we are not just talking about a blackout. And that was my quibble. Apparently this one Long Island hamlet manages to have power and water, and nowhere else does? So it was fun, and got seriously pretty spooky by the end, but I still stand by my quibble.
