Review | It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

Sam Wakefield lives in her family’s decaying mansion near the swamps, haunted by the ghosts of her ancestors. But they never bothered her. Until the day her pregnant sister Elizabeth moves back in. Now Sam sees the ghost of a strange, faceless boy. She must unravel a mystery that has stretched through history and time, before it’s too late.

For all that has ever been, the house remembers.

It is a house haunted by memory; it digests us, all of us, and spits us out again at random. 

I love haunted house stories and It Will Just Be Us absolutely delivered! This book takes a common horror trope and produces something fresh. It has ghosts, both literal and figurative. It plays with the idea of memory and fate. It deals with monsters, both dead and living. It’s about motherhood and sisterhood and family, and what one will do to protect it.

Sam is a wonderful protagonist who is at peace with her gift of seeing and her place in her family’s haunting mansion. She likes the quietness of the swamps and lives with glimpses of former inhabitants of the house including her ancestors and even her younger self. But she is troubled by the presence of a locked room, the contents which she has never seen. Her father died when she was young, and it is something that still troubles her as she never knew the full circumstances of his death. The unraveling of her family’s past made for an addictive read. I was invested in Sam’s quest and in her relationships with her mother and sister. Their relationships are complicated but you can feel the love beneath all the sharp words. I thought they feel authentic and emotionally resonant.

If you want a fast-paced horror, this is not it. This is a slow burn to savour, to let get under your skin. The writing is gorgeous. I loved the atmospheric setting of the mansion and the surrounding swamps. The final third is incredibly tense, it actually left me breathless. It’s a culmination of everything that came before and I was amazed at how the pieces fell into place. I do feel it’s worth mentioning that this book has some heavy subject matter. Grief is a shadow and it lingers when the story ends. It’s heartbreaking and will shake you to the core.

It Will Just Be Us is one of my favourite horror books of the year and I cannot recommend it enough!

CW: child death, animal death, suicide, domestic violence, physical assault

I received a copy from the publisher and Netgalley for review purposes.

About the author: Jo Kaplan

Photo by Emma Frances Logan