Dark Designs

July 31, 2017
Spangler’s short and sweet debut combines horror with a bit of police procedural and the supernatural, but she relies too heavily on genre tropes and uncomplicated concepts of good and evil, failing to delve far enough into the minds of the protagonists. Ivy Grant returns from college to join her grandmother and her homebody twin, Violet, at the family farm in Oak Hill, Ill. She must rely on the protective powers of her hereditary witchcraft and the willingness of the local police to believe her when Charlie Logan, the farmhand who tried to molest her as a child, returns as a literal monster with the help of a stolen book of evil spells. Spangler leaves so many loose ends in the social background of the characters—Ivy’s unresolved search for her missing mother, the budding romance between Violet and a shy policeman, the source of the evil book—that one might assume she’s planning a continuation of the witch family’s saga, but there’s so little meat to their story that readers may feel less anticipation than frustration.