This book is similar to Hellfire with the themes of corruption by wealth, the abusive stepmother and the older half-sister who turns out to be a murderer. Overall, it's a great read and one of my favorites. Melissa makes an appearance later on in The Blackstone Chronicles.

Good book, a real page-turner. This is one of John Saul's best. I can see it being a movie.

It had been fun doing the #40wordreview , which makes you get your point across concisely, so I decided I'm going to try to do all of my reviews this way.
*
*
Terri is taken from the lap of luxury at a young age due to her parents' divorce. Now she's back, but her half-sister had everything Teri expected, her room, attention, her father's love. What's a girl to do?
*
*
My vote? 4.5/5 stars. Excellent book to get to know John Saul if you don't already.

Gaslighting, sleepwalking, evil mother, evil half-sister, and the legend of D’Arcy who returns every August Moon Ball to claim her revenge! This was my first John Saul book (picked up at a local thrift store), and it was great! I would definitely categorize this as a “slow burn”-poor 13 year-old Melissa, abused by her own mother for years, is delighted when her half-sister Teri comes to live with them on the heels of a house fire that claimed the lives of her mother and stepfather. Melissa adopts the alternative personality of D’Arcy, which is coincidentally the name of a local female ghost, once stood up on a date to the annual August Moon Ball. D’Arcy allows Melissa to sleep while she bears the brunt of her mother Phyllis’s punishments. Teri, sweet-as-pie, seems too good to be true, and Phyllis believes she’s the daughter she always deserved, certainly much better than Melissa…I will warn you, reader, Melissa is abused and gaslit so much that you are absolutely seething for revenge by the end of this book. And unfortunately, it’s not that satisfying, which is why this was a 4 star read instead of 5. However, this is classic psychological horror fiction of the 90s, very akin to RL Stine and others, and the journey is nostalgic. There are callbacks to Stephen King’s Carrie, and even Cinderella here. In conclusion, I’m stoked to read more of John Saul!