Unspeakable Things

Unspeakable Things is set in Lilydale, Minnesota, in 1980 — a small town where nothing much seems to happen, until it does. Twelve-year-old Cassie McDowell has always known her family runs a little differently from her friends', but she's learning just how differently, and how much of it has been hidden from her. At the same time, a string of local boys begin vanishing and returning home altered, and the town's collective unease curdles into suspicion, rumor, and fear as neighbor turns on neighbor looking for someone to blame.

Jess Lourey drew the novel from real, unsolved disappearances that took place near her own childhood home in central Minnesota, and the result reads less like a conventional whodunit than a slow uncovering of a town's — and a family's — rot, filtered entirely through a child narrator who registers far more than she understands. It's a coming-of-age story built on a foundation of genuine dread, about the things families and communities agree not to say out loud.