Horror Book Preview: Read or Skip--The Girl Who Wasn’t There by Nick Clausen

 

What would happen if a book you are reading started to talk back to you? Or how would you feel if someone you are responsible for suddenly disappeared?

Forget ghosts, true horror can sometimes be found in the real world. 

Nick Clausen’s THE GIRL WHO WASN’T THERE explores themes of loss and disappearance, but since it is a horror book, most of it can be explained through the supernatural. 

THE GIRL WHO WASN’T THERE Book Plot

When 12-year-old Andy’s sister Rebecca vanishes, no one believes him when he says he heard a knocking sound coming from inside a yellow van. 

When the police are unable to find her, Andy launches his own search and uncovers something far more terrifying than he imagined. 

Because what took Rebecca may not even be human. 

THE GIRL WHO WASN’T THERE Quick Book Review and Thoughts

Siblings. They can really drive you up the wall, can’t they? In the first part of the book, we meet Andy Wisler, who is pushing his bike as his sister Rebecca is walking alongside him. He wants to stop at the library on the way home, but Rebecca finds books boring and refuses to accompany him insid,e even as he insists that their mother had warned them to stay together. 

Nevertheless, Andy relents and lets Rebecca stay across the street as he quickly makes a run into the library. Big mistake. 

Once in the library, he is intrigued by a book that he finds on the floor. It’s a book on the Wendigo written by Algernon Blackwood. Having never seen anything like this before, Andy checks out the book and leaves, only to find his sister not where he had left her. At first, he assumes she is pranking him, but when he accidentally follows another girl, Rebecca’s classmate, to her house instead of his sister's, he comes to a shocking realization that his sister is gone. 

However, just before he makes a call to his parents, a yellow van rushes past him, and Andy is certain he heard a knocking sound coming from inside the van. 

Fifty days later, Rebecca has still not shown up. The police have found no clue and don’t seem keen on following up on his hunch about the yellow van whose plate number he had not seen anyway. 

Andy feels lonely and suspects everyone blames him for not taking better care of his sister. 

He eventually gets to the library book he had borrowed and finds that a girl called Lisa Labowski had checked out the book before him, eighteen years ago. 

However, he soon finds that Lisa had died, and the book was checked out a month after she died. 

Andy decides to talk to someone about the book, especially since he has been having nightmares about the monster in his book. He meets with Regan, the librarian, who is just as surprised as he is to see the book. Andy is about to ask her about Lisa when he notices that some of the sentences in the book have changed. It is almost as if the book is talking to him. 

As the sample ends, Andy, in true terrified kid fashion, pretty much runs out of the library, scared. 

At first read, there appeared to be some similarities to THE BLACK PHONE. A kid is abducted, the remaining sibling decides to take up the investigation on their own, there is a van, and the story has something supernatural attached to it. 

However, the author gives an interesting twist to the story when he lets Andy behave like a normal kid who feels he has failed as a brother to protect his sister. The book about the Wendigo and the lines changing as if talking to him, all of these elements contribute to the intrigue and suspense of the story. 

Read or Skip?

Yes, read on, of course. A story about a missing child will always garner interest, but to give it a supernatural twist makes things even better. Of course I am hoping the story has a happy ending, and something tells me, that our little hero may just save the day. 

Whether or not the abductor is a Wendigo remains to be seen. Perhaps it is another kind of monster. And the mystery with Lisa Labowski doesn’t seem like a filler. It seems to be a piece of a puzzle that is necessary to solve and relevant to the story. 

The Girl Who Wasn’t There is a suspenseful, pulse-pounding read that horror fans should not miss. 

You can find it on Amazon