A nine-year-old girl crouches in a lilac hedge on the night of the Hunter’s Moon, freezing, waiting to find out whether the thing everybody in town leaves cakes and coins for actually exists. Her family has swept the front steps, lit a candle, arranged the offerings on a plate and gone to bed with the shades drawn, because that is what you do. She wills the figure by the door to turn around. He does. Under the hood is the stripped white skull of a horse, and by morning her front door is marked in red paint and nobody in the village will meet her eye. That is chapter ten of Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon, and it is the moment the novel declares what it is really about, which is not a monster at all.
The Debt Boone’s Ferry Keeps Paying
Boone’s Ferry, Vermont, is a place where the road dead-ends, the census counts two hundred and seventeen people, and the clothespin factory has been running since the eighteen hundreds. It is also a town with an institution. Four times a year, on named full moons, every household leaves out its best gifts. There are rules about generosity, rules about locking up, and one rule above all: never look at him, and never speak of him to an outsider. Children learn the stories at school. The minister holds a service for him at the harvest festival. An elderly woman named Josephine keeps a museum in her front room of clothespin dolls, one for every resident who has ever died, and among the ranks of ancestors there is a taller figure in patchwork leather with a horse’s skull for a head.
Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon takes its time letting the reader understand that this is not superstition being humoured but a functioning civic system, with enforcement. That patience is the book’s greatest strength. So is her refusal to let anyone in the present day be simply credulous. These people are not fools; they are the fourth generation of a town that made a decision in 1919 and has been paying the interest ever since.
A Sickness That Nobody Could Name
The 1919 chapters are where Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon is at its most assured. They belong to Frankie O’Massey, eighteen years old, orphaned, apprenticed to the village doctor and dressed head to toe in his hand-me-downs. Frankie takes notes on everything, because a problem written down in her own hand becomes a problem she can look at, and her notebook is how the reader learns the disease: yellowed eyes, wet breathing, a sweet stink like windfall apples burnt in a fire, then a stillness that reads as death to a stethoscope, then movement.
Nobody in the village has the vocabulary for this. What they do have, freshly, is the memory of the previous autumn, when the 1918 influenza pandemic took fourteen of them, and that memory does the damage. Fear supplies a culprit within days: an unnamed Irish hermit at the top of the hill who collects dead livestock, renders fat, sharpens knives and does not attend church. He is patient zero, and being first is treated as being to blame. What the town does to him is described without flinching and without relish, and afterwards the doctor insists the grave marker be left blank and polished to a mirror finish, so that anyone who comes to visit gets a good look at themselves.
The refrain that emerges from all this, spoken by three different characters across a century, is the flatly brilliant we’re all the knackerman. It means something different every time it is said, and the third meaning is the worst.
The Love Story Buried Inside Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon
The novel’s quiet centre is Frankie’s affair with Pearl Stoddard, the factory owner’s daughter, conducted in a derelict farmhouse the two of them have privately decided is their home. McMahon writes it with tenderness and appetite and, crucially, without turning either woman into a lesson. Pearl is spoiled, wicked, sharp, given to games in which the dolls die dramatically. Frankie loves her with the specific dread of someone who understands what discovery would cost in 1919 Vermont.
Late on, the book hands over a chapter to Pearl, dated 1956, and it is the finest thing here by some distance. It is an old woman still leaving one lamp burning in the window every night for someone who never came back, quoting Dickinson’s line about hope being the thing with feathers and knowing exactly what it is worth. Readers who came for folk horror will find themselves ambushed by a love letter.
Where It Slackens
Three things hold Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon back.
- The modern strand is a familiar route. Outsiders arrive, the desk clerk is unhelpful, the records burned two years ago, the phone goes dead, the vehicle is disabled, the cellar door locks. Competent, and entirely predictable.
- The brother is a device. Malcolm exists to chase business schemes, quote a self-help audiobook and disbelieve his sister until the plot needs him not to.
- The question stays open on purpose. Whether anything genuinely rose is never settled. That ambiguity suits the theme and will still frustrate a good number of readers.
Before starting, readers should know the book is hard on animals in its opening chapters, with horses shot, maimed and self-harming on the page. It also contains a man executed by fire in unsparing detail, a dissection described step by step, a character who takes his own life with a firearm, a small girl in genuine danger, a grave opened, an epidemic that kills children, and a young woman forced to hide who she loves under threat of ruin.
Where Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon Leaves You
The ending delivers three separate blows in quick succession, and only one of them is the reveal the plot has been building toward. The others are sadder and better: a confession from the least respected man in town, and that letter from 1956. There is also a final page designed to send a chill through anyone who thought the story had finished closing, and while it is the cheapest gesture in the book, it works.
If You Finish This and Want Something Else
Readers who took to Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon usually want either more village or more history. For the village, Lies on the Serpent’s Tongue by Kate Pearsall shares the sense of a community with rules outsiders are not told, and The Unknown by Riley Sager offers the same pleasure of a local legend that turns out to have paperwork. Anyone here for Frankie and Pearl should try Herculine by Grace Byron, which puts queer interiority at the centre of its horror rather than the margins. Beyond these shelves, McMahon’s own The Winter People remains the natural next stop, and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, which the author credits directly, is still the short, perfect version of everything this novel argues about crowds.
