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Cult and Commune Thriller: A Mother Always Knows by Sarah Strohmeyer

2 Apr

There’s something primal and untethered to be expected from A Mother Always Knows. The cover entices being watched, and the synopsis unsettles with horror rooted in folk lore. This was the Hoboken Public Library’s Horror/Thriller Book Club February pick.

Book cover for A Mother Always Knows by Sarah Strohmeyer. A cloaked figure with antlers stands in a dark forest with a glowing light behind them. The title is in bold green with occult symbols. A pentagram replaces the "O" in "KNOWS". A stream runs through the foreground.

Stella O’Neill is working at the local public library, and no one suspects she’s living under an assumed name, a tactic to keep herself hidden after witnessing her mother’s murder as a ten-year-old in a Vermont cult. The crime is still unsolved, but when her peace is upended, she is forced to flee Boston and revisit the fear of the cult she grew up in. She heads to the off-the-grid retreat to confront the leader and guru, Radcliffe MacBeath. Stella has both determination and a supernatural gift guiding her to outwit the charismatic leader and uncover the identity of her mother’s killer.

The book delivers a first-person suspense story that, while lacking a bit in its promise of terror through forced community and tradition, delivers on a few heart-wrenching scenes of close quarters and manipulated folklore ready to repeat itself.

I’ll admit, we were a bit fooled, but I say this so that you, the reader, can set your expectations. Here is the question the story actually presents: What do we actually want from the people we meet through our lives, authenticity or belonging, and do these two go hand-in-hand?

Imperfection is human, and this story’s protagonist, Stella, certainly has her flaws, including the troubling tendency to fall into traps of her own making. The effect is more “why would anyone do that?” But hindsight is twenty-twenty, and perhaps if we were in the situation Stella finds herself in, anxiety constantly pumping and fear forever looming, we too wouldn’t realize these blind spots.

What struck me most were the recurring patterns in the story that showed the cult’s cold hands holding its members.

The author includes sharp one-liners and some self-aware comedy to break the tension, though it sometimes deflates it. But humor under pressure is a very real human response, so in that sense, the effort is worthy. A Mother Always Knows achieves a different type of thrill that one of our readers put’s perfectly:
“A Mother Always Knows felt like a horror novel written by someone who only cared about a twist. After investing so much time into the cult, we’re left with an ending straight out of Scooby Doo.” – Michael Schmidt

For readers who prefer their suspense stories character-driven and with much internal monologue, this book may be for you. I finished A Mother Always Knows, and I’m a bit uncertain about the answer to its question, but then again, with these types of stories, uncertainty can be intentional. This story is for readers who want tension presented efficiently through different POV lenses in a first-person thriller, who don’t necessarily need their horror ancestrally folkish or Manson-esque.

Interested in the Horror/Thriller Book Club? Please email reference@hobokenlibrary.org, or register for our next meeting by searching under Events on our website.

Have you read A Mother Always Knows? What did you think? Comment below.

You can reserve it in the BCCLS system here, or access the ebook and audiobook on Hoopla.

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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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Kanopy: BBC Christmas Ghost Stories

26 Mar
Image showing a single lit white candle on a dark table, its wax dripping, with blurred bookshelves in the background. The text reads “BBC – A Ghost Story for Christmas.”

BBC’s Christmas Ghost Stories on Kanopy are ‘snuggle into your armchair,’ oral folklores that let the ghosts come through the quiet, not the loud. We’re in a cozy inn or country home, under the lamplight of a study, in the official capacity of authority and tenured procedure, or in the storytelling intimacy of public radio. These stories present fright as if they’re a three part/pint story told against a pub’s fire. 

(You can watch these stories any time. Christmas, in fact, has very little do with them, and in most cases none).

Each episode begins with a tea-time beginning that introduces us to the characters and establishes the whispers of their confusion or animosity in piecing their current situation together – the job they have, the move their making, their qualms with society, or the injustice on them no one in their rationality believes

There are seven 30-minute episodes available on Kanopy. These are the four I enjoyed the most:   

Woman of Stone – A woman recounts the chilling tale of newlyweds settling into a small cottage in a quiet village and how the couple soon finds themselves overshadowed by superstitious warnings of the legend of two marble tomb effigies who are said to rise each year and walk. The husband dismisses this as mere folklore. The wife does not, and one night she is all alone…

The Dead Room – The tale of a long-running radio horror series where a veteran presenter of the series and renowned celebrity of sorts for his voice and oratory skills finds he must adapt to changing times and tastes of radio listeners and digesters of horror stories. He asks, “Whatever happened to the classic ghost stories and the good old days?” 

Be careful how much of the past you want to revisit.  

The Mezzotint (A very intensive process where a picture’s lines are intended to hold ink) – A curator of a small university museum who specializes in topography of the British Isles is baffled when an art dealer sends him details of an interesting engraving of an old country house. It’s ordinary though…at first, until the curator sees a figure where there was none before. With every viewing, it has moved, getting closer and closer to the house. Rationality falls to the impossible drawing closer in the picture and eventually until it knocks. 

Martin’s Close – An adaptation of a ghost story by MR James. 1684. Someone is on trial for his life and he’s facing the infamous ‘hanging judge’. However, this is not a cut-and-dried murder case and the unexplainable cannot be explained (or at least believed by judge and jury).

The Mezzotint and The Dead Room were my favorite because both presented the supernatural and strange as an inconvenience and a break from reality that logic just couldn’t define. The fear is quiet and suspicious, presented in a way that you believe the character is challenging his own rationality, and even when others challenge them. Dread pushes through – the tap, tap, tapping, if you will – and slowly drives them mad until their psyche is too mushed to defend against the horror revealing itself in form before their eyes.  

The terrifying and supernatural find their voice through the quiet and uncertainty and not the characters giving it to them, which is something wonderfully distinctive to the British way of telling ghost stories. There is a deep questioning quality to the investigation of what exactly is happening that drags us along as if we were standing right beside the actor or actress. They ramble through their broken logic and spin a yo-yo of logic while desperately grasping pieces together. 

Additional episodes include:

Kanopy can be accessed with your Hoboken Library Card and episodes streamed with your complimentary tickets (you get 60 per month-each of these individual episodes is between 1-2 tickets).

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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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