One of the reading challenges I am doing this year requires reading a young adult horror novel. I used What Stalks Among Us by Sarah Hollowell to check off that box. To be honest I probably would have read this one anyway because of the haunted/mysterious corn maze, kind of punny title (corn has stalks …get it?) and time loops, well all those things check off internal “this is going to be good” checkboxes for me.
The plot of the novel is that besties Sadie and Logan decide to ditch a field trip to an amusement park (for valid reasons but I did have a moment of “a school trip to an amusement park and your passing it by!? What?”) and end up choosing instead to explore this random corn maze they come across. This is a horror novel so that is a choice that drives the narrative, even if so obviously a wrong choice. Never go into the creepy seemingly abandoned corn maze! And Saddie and Logan very quickly learn why, in this instance, it would have been best to leave the corn maze alone. Because they find bodies in the corn maze – their bodies, they have stumbled into a time loop and someone/something is in the maze with them and it’s killing them. Over and over. And over …
Special shout out to the lead characters that the author has crafted, both Sadie and Logan are great, both are dealing with the trauma of the maze and trauma from other things that have happened in their life. Sadie is our point-of-view character and as a person who plays video games, I appreciated her thinking of the maze as a kind of video game and applying some video game logic to it all. I also enjoyed how she would think about different dialogue options, just like you’d get in a video game.
This is a horror novel, and beyond the fact that there are deaths (a lot of repeating deaths) they aren’t that graphic for the most part. It’s upsetting, but for me, the way the the book also deals with toxic relationships is what was most upsetting, and perhaps the most triggering. It’s handled well – this is about monsters that are made of corn, and time loops and also about how toxic controlling people can hurt your soul.
This book is widely imaginative and atmospheric. I love a good time loop, but this is the first time I’ve read one where the characters encounter remnants of their previous loops, so gold star to the author for that. The corn maze is pretty obviously operating under different rules of time and space and so there are different “rooms” for the characters to explore, populated with various … things. Things of varying levels of creepy and unsettling. Yes, sometimes it got a bit much for me, I applaud the super creepy but there were times when it was just – a lot. Like atmosphere overload, and some of the ideas the book was playing around with didn’t feel entirely fleshed out … but that makes me want to go back and re-read it. Loop around again if you will and see what I pick up this time on my trip through the maze.