Diavola

There is a specific horror to the family vacation and it has nothing to do with locked towers. It is the seating chart at dinner, the sibling who keeps score, the parent who booked the villa and expects gratitude. Jennifer Marie Thorne looked at that ordinary dread, added an actual haunted tower and let the two feed each other.

What it's about

Anna Pace is the family scapegoat, the one who gets blamed for the mood, the delays, the general weather of a Pace gathering. She arrives at a rented Tuscan villa for a two-week reunion she is dreading for entirely human reasons: her twin, her parents, her grandmother, all the usual roles pre-assigned. The villa is gorgeous. The wine is good. The light is the kind of gold you see in glossy travel spreads. There is also a tower on the property that stays locked and Anna, being Anna, is the one who notices it will not stay that way. What she finds inside is where the sunlit part of this Italian gothic starts to curdle. The premise stays deliberately small: one family, one house, one thing that should have been left shut.

Why everyone's talking about it

The pitch that keeps circulating is "sunlit gothic," and it earns the phrase. Most haunted-house stories reach for fog and candlelight. Thorne sets hers in blazing Mediterranean daytime, which turns out to be far more unsettling, because there is nowhere for the dread to hide. Readers who love their horror tangled up with family dysfunction (the real monster is often at the table) have taken to it hard. So have people who like a prickly, funny narrator carrying a scary book on her back. If you want a slow atmospheric burn that trusts you to sit with discomfort, this is your kind of trip. If you need a fast body count or a tidy mythology explained in full, you may find yourself checking the map. It leans literary and character-first, which is the whole appeal for some and the sticking point for others.

The verdict, for now

Pack it for a beach chair and enjoy the small cruelty of reading about someone else's worse vacation. Go in for the family knives and the golden-hour dread rather than for jump scares and let the tower do its slow work. Just maybe finish it before you plan your own group getaway to a villa with one room nobody mentions.