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Hannah’s Pick of the Week: Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio

cover jacket of Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio, has a selection of dead rats with fungus growing out of them

“They stared down at the ground in stony imitation of the graveyard angels, without the blank unblinking eyes or patchy beards of lichen. When they heard Edie’s footsteps round the Drewalt obelisk, they looked up and she looked down and realized that what they were actually staring at was a hole in the ground. 

M.L. Rio, Graveyard Shift, pg. 3

If you did not realize that Halloween was just around the corner and were looking for a quick dive into the gothic and macabre, M.L. Rio has brought out an occult offering just in time. The author of If We Were Villains has dragged together a ragtag team of unwilling investigators in a dark academic adventure that only spans from midnight ‘til dawn, but Rio gives it her all with atmospheric suspense and realistic characters.  

Drawn together by insomnia and needing a safe place to smoke near campus, Hannah, Edie, Tuck, Tamar, and Theo (collectively known as the Anchorites) often spend their nights lighting up in the cordoned-off cemetery next to the university campus, to which they all are, even if indirectly, connected to. Suddenly, a fresh empty grave appears in the spot in which the Anchorites frequent, churning up questions and revealing dark secrets hidden by the members. Who dug the grave? Who’s supposed to go inside it? What is the university hiding from our five collegial outcasts? 

Growing up with Scooby Doo and Goosebumps, I find myself missing those quick bites of horror that satiate the need for things that go bump in the night. Rio has graciously given me a fun and twisting novella that reads very well as an audiobook! Each POV character has their own flair and their own voice that reads through with or without a voice actor. For fans of T. Kingfisher’s fungal horror What Moves the Dead and the dramatic dark nature of M.L. Rio’s debut If We Were Villains, Graveyard Shift is a joy-riding addition to Rio’s creepy-a-la-Cambridge wheelhouse.  

 

author image of M.L. Rio

Photo by Cait Brady

Categories: Books and More

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