Book Review: Dead Eleven by Jimmy Juliano

There’s a remote place in Wisconsin called Clifford Island, off of the Door County peninsula in Lake Michigan. Not a whole lot is known about it, and the locals seem to like it that way. Their desire to be left alone extends to erasing as much information as possible about themselves from the Internet. For the most part, this discourages the curious from visiting, especially when there are so many other beautiful, and far more welcoming, places in the region. 

Harper Coates, however, has arrived on Clifford Island with a mission.

Growing up, Harper had always been his little sister Willow’s protector. An adulthood that took them to different states caused them to understandably drift apart. After the death of her son Jacob, the distance between the siblings becomes more awkward and difficult to breach. Harper doesn’t even realize the true extent of Willow’s grief till one of her neighbors is forced to contact him about a property issue after both Willow and her estranged husband go incommunicado. 

A visit to their neglected Illinois home provides Harper with a single but significant clue as to where Willow might be. His job as a journalist helps him confirm that his little sister did indeed abandon her home for Clifford Island. He follows her north and quickly discovers that while she had briefly worked on Clifford as a youth ministry director, she apparently left again shortly before he arrived. Determined to track her down, his search of her former lodgings yields a hidden letter addressed to him. As he uncovers more letters, many of them written to her husband, Harper begins to better understand Willow’s state of mind, as well as her motives for coming to such an isolated place. 

Part of her reasoning seems to have come from not only what happened to her son, but also from her own terrifying experiences as a youth:

There’s a reason those things happened to me as a kid. There’s a reason I had that nightmare again. I’m supposed–we’re supposed–to do something about this, I just don’t know what. But it’s more than this cosmic hunch.

 

I guess…I’m feeling like a bad mom. What if I didn’t really know our boy? I tried so hard. We tried so hard. I thought I knew everything about Jacob, but what if I didn’t? Was Jacob keeping a secret from us? Did that horror I experienced as a kid get passed down to our son somehow? It sounds so stupid and far-fetched, but what if some evil found Jacob, too?

While sympathetic to Willow’s guilt, Harper is skeptical of her claims of a hereditary evil. But as he gets to know the locals and their curious customs, including their strange insistence on living as if it’s still the early 1990s, he begins to wonder if there isn’t a malevolent force lurking on the island after all. Has Willow somehow run afoul of something supernatural? Or has she become the victim of something far more prosaic? 

His main ally in uncovering the truth is a rebellious teenager who doesn’t believe in any of the local superstitions. Lily Becker is the first person to tell him that Willow actually was there, but even she thinks that Willow left of her own free will. Will Harper be able to find and save his sister, or will he fall prey to the evil lurking on Clifford, too?

Told in the form of letters, interviews and “reenactments”, this tale of the mortal battle to keep a horrific hunger at bay is heavy on atmosphere as the Coates siblings brave a disorienting time warp in their pursuit of the truth. An early chapter shines the spotlight on Esther and Gloria, two elderly Clifford residents whose daily routines are abruptly interrupted by death. Esther tries, and fails, to soothe herself in the aftermath with prayer:

She thought how hollow the words sounded, for even though she sang in the church choir and attended every service as sure as the sun rises, she didn’t really believe in that sort of thing. Esther believed in other things. She believed in order, in equilibrium. She believed in the universe, and she was now quite certain it was some physical manifestation of that, gathering outside, coming for revenge. Things were out of whack. Unbalanced. Gloria’s death was the cause. Poor, poor Gloria. She and Esther had held together their little corner of the cosmos, and now that was broken.

 

Esther would now be punished.

Despite being drenched in the language of urban legend and campfire horror stories, Dead Eleven is a surprisingly considerate meditation on grief, nostalgia, and the human urge to control the unknown and unavoidable. Clifford Island and its inhabitants are a solid metaphor for blind faith, and the great and terrible things that people will do when they believe fervently in a cause. The book also contains one of the best descriptions of a horror novel antagonist I’ve ever had the chilling pleasure of encountering. It’s a solidly scary debut that has already been optioned for film and should translate to that medium magnificently.