"4.5 stars

I was NOT expecting this slim novel to be so awesome, so horror-based, and so suspenseful. Loved it. It would have been an automatic 5 stars, but some things didn't jive for me.

Suspense: ★★★★��
Pacing: ★★��
Setting: ★★★★��

Elise is told her best friend, Julie, went missing on a solo hiking trip. Two years go by, and Elise refuses to believe or accept that Julie's dead. She's sure Julie will turn up again, good as new.

Two years to the day that Julie disappears, she returns. She doesn't remember anything about her time missing, and things are...different. But Elise is ecstatic anyway—Julie came back.

To celebrate Julie's return, Elise and Julie's two other friends organize a girl's weekend at a lodge in the New England woods. The lodge is crazy wacky—think individually-themed rooms, Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton, and The Shining all in one—and the girls are immediately set up for a weird time.

But the lodge isn't the weird part. Julie is.

Something's wrong with Julie, and it might not be what Elise is expecting...

Wow. What a cool, unique, horrific debut. This clocks in at just under 200 pages, and I devoured it in one sitting. The suspense was killer—at any given moment, I was on pins and needles waiting for the next creepy thing, the next reveal. The girls' friendship dynamics were painfully raw, honest, and full of recognizable traits that I identified with from my own friends. The reveal, while easier to guess than others, was still well done and I loved the final climax.

The only thing that kept The Return from being an automatic 5 stars for me was the overall pacing. You can tell that this story had a killer hook and good suspense, but due to the lack of a side-plot or believable red herrings its pacing suffered. Lots of dialogue-based scenes and not enough significant action. However, as the suspense was done SO well, this was relatively easy to ignore. It would have been a much bigger problem if this novel had been longer.

Thank you to Berkley via NetGalley for an ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

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"Over the top, campy, cheesy, gruesome, crazy, entertaining. This book was like a bad horror movie that you watch over and over and over again because you are just so Hooked. SO once upon a time there were four friends Elise, Mae, Molly, and Julie. The girls met in college and formed an unbreakable bond. When Julie goes missing they are all devastated, where is their Bestie? A year after Julie goes missing her husband Tristan holds a memorial, but Elise is not convinced that Julie is dead. Been two years to the day after Julie goes missing she shows up again on the porch swing wearing the same clothes she went missing in. Julie seems to have come out of this mostly unscathed but she cannot remember where she was. The besties are all so excited and plan a girls weekend at a Hotel in the Catskills. What follows is a very interesting tale. Is the hotel haunted? Is Julie possessed? Has Elise gone crazy?

This book is not going to work for everybody. It is not a thriller this is horror with a campy vibe. Some parts were a little gruesome, some parts were a little unbelievable, and a lot of parts were over the top. You may never look at meat the same way again. A tacky hotel, a group of friends, and things going bump in the night. I may never figure out if I liked this book or not, but I do know it kept me entertained from cover to cover.

This book in emojis 😱 🥩 🦷 🥩 👭 🥩 🐷

*** Big thank you to Berkley for my gifted copy of this book. All opinions are my own. ***"

"”You can’t erase your past when there are pieces of it scattered inside other people.��

Jules goes missing and stays missing for two years, but then she reappears one day with no memory of what has happened to her over the past few years. Her best friends are unsure as to how to handle this stroke of good fortune. They had a funeral for her. They mourned her. They accepted that she was going to be a missing piece for the rest of their lives.

They can’t decide if they are more happy about her reappearance or more freaked out about it. It doesn’t help that Jules is in some ways the same Jules and in other ways not. It is like experiencing the vestiges of the past wrapped in dark forebodings of the future.

Mae, Molly, Elise, and Jules are all friends, but as always, with dynamics like this, there can only be one best friend, and it works out great if the same people find each other to be besties. Mae and Molly have always been closer, and so when Jules disappeared, Elise, who always felt that Jules was her BFF, became the wheel on an axle missing the other wheel. So either their relationship would have to evolve into an Estonian Nobe 100 or Elise was always going to feel like a teeter totter without someone to make her bounce.

So Mae books them all rooms in a themed room hotel out in the middle of nowhere where they will have a chance to rekindle the magic that has always made their relationship with each other so special. ”Sometimes when we’re all together, I get confused about who is who. Where one of us stops and the others start. We overlap, bleed together.�� Maybe I’m just paranoid, but as they take me on a tour of this hotel, I start to feel creeped out, creeped out in a Stephen King sort of way. I’m grinning though because this has all the makings of a modern gothic extravaganza.

”I hear it again. It’s inside the walls. A knocking.
Pipes. It must be the pipes.��

Usually, it is the pipes or the building settling or something equally innocuous or at least we convince ourselves of that. God knows how many times I’ve woken in a hotel, in the dead of the night, sure that I’ve heard something sinister, only to roll over and go back to sleep. Somebody getting attacked in a hotel better scream bloody murder and more than once if they are going to rouse their fellow travellers.

I was a bit leery about spending almost 300 pages with four women in their late twenties. My mild fears never manifested themselves; other things manifested themselves, but I didn’t ever feel like I was missing important components of my physiology to read this book. There is only one man in the story, and he is kept off stage to be used as a minor character in the lead up to the grand reveal.

It doesn’t matter. Men aren’t needed. The women do a lovely job, just fine without interference from a swinging dick or two. The thing is, I actually really liked them. Rachel Harrison does a great job separating their characters and presenting them to us as individualistic, intelligent, and resourceful women. They are also snarky (love me some snarky) without being excessively cruel. ”We don’t share our feelings, at least not in-depth. Only when we’re hammered or desperate. We’re all repressed, and that’s how we like it. That’s part of why we are close. We have a mutual understanding.�� In this age of confessing all to the world, it is refreshing to spend a weekend, albeit bizarre weekend, with some people who know how to carry their own water. Harrison also does not resort to having a character do something completely and utterly stupid to advance the plot. Thank you, Ms. Harrison, thank you very much. I loathe the dumb move concept in movies and books, even though I know as a species we are quite capable of doing completely moronic things when pressed to make decisions. If there are miscalculations by the characters in this book, it is simply out of true concern for another.

So the crux of this whole matter is that Jules is enough like Jules to pass as Jules, except to people who have held her under a microscope for years. Friends this close will notice any deviation, any unplucked eyebrow hair, any conversational misstep. What happened to Jules? Is Jules even Jules?

What the frill is going on?

And now you can’t possibly resist finding out what the frill is going on, and you won’t be disappointed. So come along with me and the gals on a little trip, and let’s all figure out together what exactly is going bump in the night.

I want to thank Berkley and Penguin Random House for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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