A mother carries her sleeping four-year-old down to a Florida marina at sunset, wipes melted Popsicle from the child’s fingers and asks her, very gently, to describe her dreams. The girl points across the water at a pale pink building on a sandbar and says that is where she goes swimming, and that a red-haired friend waits at the door. Within a week the mother is dead inside that building. Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould opens with this short, terrible scene and then spends three hundred pages letting the grown daughter discover how much it explained.
A Daughter Who Decided Not to Believe
Paige Keller is nineteen when the novel proper begins, home from a Michigan college for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Kaleidoscope Key massacre. On a single May night in 2001, an entire senior class died in a luxury resort without a mark on them; five teenagers walked out and never said what they saw. Paige’s mother was one of the five. She was also the one who went back.
Gould makes a smart choice by giving the story to the sceptic. Paige has spent years training herself out of the dreams and the theories, mostly to survive a childhood spent next to people who could not. When her estranged friend KJ Collins goes missing and the trail leads to the island, Paige goes in narrating every eerie thing as a draught, a sound system, a stunt staged for a vlogger’s camera. The comedy of that denial is real, and so is its slow collapse. Much of the pleasure of Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould lies in watching a careful, organised mind run out of explanations one room at a time, until the only reasonable conclusion left is the unreasonable one. A favourite small moment comes when KJ, unnervingly at home inside the maze, compares their situation to a game the two of them once played with a pet hamster, swapping their hands beneath it as it hopped down so it never reached the floor. The image is childish and cruel and exactly right.
A Building Where the Last Light Never Goes Out
The resort itself is the novel’s great invention. Doors open onto rooms that should not exist: a coral-and-teal diner, a bowling alley with cartoon pins sliding across its screens, an escalator that only starts moving once a foot touches it. A cheery lobby melody signals that everything is about to be reshuffled. A low, wet growl sends anyone who hears it into blind panic. Mirrors stop reflecting the person standing in front of them. Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould is at its most frightening when it is at its most specific, as in the suite of a boy whose room keeps flooding, who has turned his Jacuzzi into a lifeboat.
The other half of the book belongs to 2001. Interludes follow Casey Keller through senior night in present tense, and they are wrenching. Casey is the peacemaker between Tess, who is climbing toward the popular crowd, and Summer Hayes, a pastor’s daughter whose sexuality was exposed and mocked the year before. Gould is unsparing about how small acts of cowardice among friends become, under pressure, something far worse. These chapters are where Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould earns its seriousness: the horror is supernatural, but the betrayals are recognisably human.
Keeping Quiet Until the Last Light Goes Out
The book’s real subject is silence. The surviving parents built tidy lives on a rule that the resort is never discussed, and their children grew up with the consequences and none of the information. Gould treats this as a form of transgenerational trauma without ever reaching for the vocabulary, letting it show instead in Paige’s brittleness, in KJ’s devotion to a mother who drinks to forget, and in a polished couple who will not answer a simple question about a dead classmate over dinner. The answers, when they come, are bleak and well judged.
The relationship between Paige and KJ is the warmth that keeps the book from turning cold. Their year of estrangement is drawn with real specificity, and the realisation that what Paige felt was love rather than friendship arrives late and quietly. The romance stays tender and clean, kissing only, which suits a story in which holding on to someone is the bravest available act.
Where the Logic Frays
The difficulties are structural rather than tonal, and they cluster in the back half:
- The rules are revised so often, by so many characters, that the climax depends on a reversal the novel has not quite prepared.
- The fullest account of what the resort is arrives as a long speech from its most dangerous presence, and a later reunion explains where it should dramatise.
- A run of chapters after the midpoint loops through searching and arguing without moving the story much.
- Recurring effects, the stuttering lights and near-drownings especially, lose force through repetition.
None of these sink Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould, but together they keep a very good horror novel from being a great one. A reader should also know that the violence is explicit: teenagers kill one another, bodies are swallowed by floors, blood is offered as payment, and grief, neglect, self-harm and suicide all sit close to the surface. The publisher pitches it at thirteen and up; it reads as upper YA, with a cast just out of high school.
The Writer and Her Recurring Ghosts
Courtney Gould lives in Salem, Oregon, and her novels keep returning to the same coordinates: queer girls, rural or forgotten places, and mothers lost to something the living cannot name. Where Echoes Die (2023) sent two sisters to a small town to investigate their mother’s death, and What the Woods Took (2024) trapped a teenager in a wilderness programme with something in the trees. Her acknowledgments here even admit, with some amusement, that her own mother has noticed how often a mother dies in these books.
This is her most structurally ambitious work, braiding two timelines and a mythology that stretches back to a 1910 shipwreck. Wednesday Books released Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould in the US on 13 October 2026 (a UK paperback from First Ink appeared a few days earlier), and the result reads like a writer pushing past the comfortable edges of her own style.
Readers drawn to the anniversary-night dread should try Night of Madness by Ryan Douglass, another YA horror novel built on a single catastrophic night and the debts it leaves. Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand shares the island setting, the hungry presence and the bond between girls who decide to fight it together.
After the Last Page
What lingers from Until the Last Light Goes Out by Courtney Gould is not the gore, though there is plenty, but the prologue’s mother asking her small daughter to describe a dream, and the long shadow that one question casts. Gould has written a horror novel about inheritance, about the cost of every story a parent decides not to tell, and she makes the case that the only defence against a place that feeds on fear is refusing to let go of the people beside you.