Cow Lady can’t see why she should do anything about it. What’s anyone ever done for her? Who’d listen? Only the journalist covering the lives of her homeless companions. Molly Cates. All women have a goth phase, we all need to mourn. Some of us just choose to show it on the outside.”

I loved the whole plot for all its detailed descriptions and inter-relationships between the characters. Also, you might be thinking that there are not many twists, but I can assure you the second half is filled with them. What's more to adore? a secret fondness budding between two poles apart characters. All the Dead Lie Down, by Kyrie McCauley, is a wonderfully dark queer horror novel. The story follows Marin Blythe, who is moving into Lovelace House as a nanny following her mother’s tragic death. Lovelace House is a gorgeous old estate located off a peninsula in New England. The house is inhabited by famous horror novelist Alice Lovelace, her three daughters (Evie, Wren, and Thea Hallowell), and their caretaker, Neera. Alice invited Marin on as Wren and Thea’s nanny since she and Marin’s mother, Cordelia, were childhood best friends. After the girls’ father’s death the previous year, they became more unruly and drove every previous nanny away. The girls’ strange behavior starts almost immediately, escalating from harmless pranks to (almost) attempted murder. Soon, the eldest sister, Evie, arrives home, having received an urgent letter from Wren. The more Marin entwines herself in the Lovelace-Hallowell family, particularly Evie, the more she learns the true meaning of what Wren told her: “Everything stays at Lovelace, down to the bone.”

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But as Marin settles in, she can’t escape the anxiety that shadows her. Dead birds appear in Marin’s room. The children’s pranks escalate. Something dangerous lurks in the woods. The poem comprises six quatrains, that is stanzas of four lines each. There is a simple ABCB rhyme scheme. The metrical rhythm is made up of alternating iambic tetrameters — that is four metrical feet, each foot comprising an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable — and iambic trimeters, that is three metrical feet per line. The characters really hooked me into the story, too. It’s a very predominantly female cast. I think the only male named characters are the Lovelace girls’ father and a neighbor man who kind of looks out for danger in the woods. The younger sisters are mischievous and odd. It’s easy to tell they’re lonely and grieving, and that they’re keeping some kind of secret. I liked the push and pull feeling of the relationship between them and Marin, who feels drawn to them because of their sorrow and loneliness but wary because they can be capricious and cold. The Plague has left a population divided between Elites and Ordinaries—those who have powers and those who don’t; now, an Ordinary teen fights for her life. I think this is a perfect book for those who want to dip their toes into horror, and for those who like a healthy balance between a dark aesthetic and moments of hope and levity.

Stanzas one and two explore what “Death” is not. This is followed by two stanzas that try to define death. The final stanza echoes the first two in attempting to make a definitive comparison — “But, most, like Chaos —”

All the Dead Lie Down

McCauley skillfully wrangles haunting atmosphere, anticipatory tension, and macabre humor to cultivate a slow-boiling thriller couched in a decades-old mystery. The sweet connection between Marin and Evie is solid and affirming, providing levying contrast to occasional moments of gruesome imagery and outright horror." — Publishers Weekly Some scholars have argued that the poem can be read as exploring the experience of a traumatized Union Soldier during the American Civil War. Read more in this article published at White Heat, a blog run by Dartmouth college. A copy of this book was provided by the publisher, Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, for review.